Week 4 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 4 — Reason or Experience: Sourcing and Testing Claims to Know — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Philosophy Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 4 of the term — place Descartes' famous words in the right book, reconstruct the cogito and an argument about certainty, test a prediction with the problem of induction, weigh rationalism against empiricism, and explain the problem of induction to someone new to philosophy.

This week you learned rationalism and empiricism, Descartes' methodical doubt, the dream argument, the evil deceiver, and the cogito, Locke's white paper, and Hume's problem of induction. In Week 2 you learned standard form, validity, and soundness, and in Week 3 you met Plato's worry that appearances might fool us. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Philosophy Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together.

The task

You will use this week's pinned sources and Dataset B, the argument set (illustrative). Dataset B's premises are written for teaching and are not claims the course endorses; the course keys its arguments for validity only, never for soundness, because the premises are open questions. The two everyday cases below were written for this assignment; they are illustrative and describe no real person or place.

Part A — get the source right, then reconstruct. A post on a study-group forum reads: "Descartes proved it in the Meditations: 'I think, therefore I am.' Those are his exact words." Do three things:

Correct the post. Name the work and part the wording comes from, who translated the English words, whose insertion the Latin in parentheses is, and how the Meditations themselves state the idea, in words.
Reconstruct the cogito. Write the reasoning behind the Second Meditation's conclusion in standard form (P1, P2, then C introduced by "So"), mark any premise you add as "(added)", name the form, and say whether it is valid, with a one-sentence reason from the definition of validity. Then name one premise a critic could question.
Key argument 1. Write Dataset B's argument 1 in standard form ("If knowledge requires certainty, then I know very little. Knowledge requires certainty. So I know very little."), name its form, key it for validity, and explain in one sentence why the course does not key it for soundness.

Then work this problem, showing your reasoning:

The Discourse on the Method dates from 1637 and the Meditations on First Philosophy from 1641. How many years separate them?

Part B — test a prediction and weigh the positions. Work this problem first, showing your reasoning:

Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding has a title page dated 1690, and the Meditations on First Philosophy date from 1641. How many years separate them?

Then do three things:

Find the hidden premise. A city bus planner says: "Ridership rose every autumn in our records, so it will rise this autumn too." Write the planner's reasoning in standard form with the premise that carries the past into the future marked "(added)". Then explain, in your own words, why supporting that added premise with past experience would be a circular argument.
State both positions at their strongest. State rationalism and empiricism each as its best defenders would, give the strongest objection to each, and give a reply from each position's own side. Use Locke's white paper and Hume's problem of induction where they fit.
Name the disagreement. End with one plain sentence naming exactly where rationalism and empiricism disagree.

Explain it to a non-expert

A younger cousin who has never taken philosophy reads about Hume and says, "So Hume proved that science is useless." Write a 3–5 sentence message in everyday words that explains what the problem of induction actually asks, why it is not a claim that science is useless, and one honest limit of what the problem shows. Explain any term your cousin might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who asks why Plato's cave is not a true story about real prisoners. Model answer: "The cave is a story Plato tells to make a point, not a report of something that happened. He uses prisoners watching shadows to ask whether what we take for reality could be a kind of shadow. Philosophers call this an allegory: a story whose parts stand for ideas. One limit: the story raises the question, but it does not settle it by itself."

Use that pattern for your message to your cousin, with your own explanation of the problem of induction.

Revise and reflect

Put your first draft away for a few hours, then reread it against Chapter 4. For the correction, check the work, part, translator, and Latin against the chapter's record; for each reconstruction, underline the added premise and check the form's name against Week 2's list; for each position, ask whether its best defender would sign your statement of it; and check that your cousin message separates what justifies a prediction from whether a prediction is useful. Make at least one change and keep both versions. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

(a) Which change made your sourcing or one of your reconstructions more exact, and which definition or pinned fact showed you it was needed?
(b) Which change made your statement of rationalism or empiricism stronger, and what had you left out at first?

Deliverables

Submit one document or recording that contains, in this order:

your Part A forum-post correction, your cogito reconstruction, your keying of argument 1, and your first year gap;
your Part B year gap, the bus planner's reasoning, both positions with objections and replies, and your plain sentence;
your message to your cousin;
your first and revised versions of the part you changed, and your reflection.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about five minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the correction, the reconstructions, the evaluation, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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