My first summer camp at Spartanburg Day School starts on Monday and I’ve lovingly titled it “Griffin Mythbusters.” The setup goes something like this. The ~20 5-9th Graders that have signed up and I will start Monday by hammering out a good urban myth to examine. It might be something covered on the TV show [...]
Tag Archives: science
Work of Philosophers vs Work of Scientists
by Sam Harrelson on 19. Jul, 2010 in Philosophy, Science
From Discovery Education (warning, it’s a PDF). It’s taken me 31 years and I can barely tell the difference between the two if at all. The trick is to help students realize that science wasn’t (magically) discovered in the 1600′s by Galileo (as this guide would have us to “believe”). Nor has science progressed on [...]
Science Is Boring
by Sam Harrelson on 24. Dec, 2009 in Posts
It is now time to come clean. This glittering depiction of the quest for knowledge is… well, perhaps not an outright lie, but certainly a highly edited version of the truth. Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a [...]
The Kids Are Alright
by Sam Harrelson on 27. Jul, 2009 in Posts
Children are unconsciously the most rational beings on earth,” says Alison Gopnik, “brilliantly drawing accurate conclusions from data, performing complex statistical analyses, and doing clever experiments.” And not only does empirical work reveal this about babies and small children, but what is thus revealed throws light on some of philosophy’s more intriguing questions about knowledge, [...]
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