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What do you love about teaching scientific inquiry?

I believe learning about the wide variety of strategies scientists invent to learn about the world is both interesting and necessary for each of us to make wise choices and live good lives. A common and naïve notion that scientific inquiry can deliver certain and unchanging truths is misguided. It opens doors to simplistic, misplaced, and sometimes dangerous skepticism about the practices and results of scientific inquiry.Science seldom delivers certainty about our complex universe.Rather it seeks knowledge that is coherent, supported with evidence, challenged by ongoing research, and revised as new information is uncovered. It is a remarkable, largely successful, but thoroughly human enterprise.

How does what you do in the classroom reflect the impact on the world that your field has?

Philosophy of Social Science deals with the assumptions, methods, and controversies in sciences that study phenomenon at the heart of human life: political science, economics, history, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, criminology, etc. Therefore, learning about how these sciences study social phenomena and the strengths and weaknesses of these methods helps us understand claims and counter-claims that are common in these fields. I believe that studying the assumptions, methods, and corresponding results of social sciences prepares students to assess and apply results from these sciences more effectively. Those applications have significant impact.