Cornerstone: What is Knowledge?
Welcome to Quest University! The Cornerstone course at Quest serves as a microcosm of your entire education at Quest. Part of the goal of the course is to introduce you to Quest, and to taking class on the block system. This course will also introduce you, in a whirlwind fashion, to the notion of an interdisciplinary liberal arts education. This is an interdisciplinary course in which we will be exploring ideas from the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural and theoretical sciences. While probably no other course you take at Quest will be quite as interdisciplinary as this one, your education as a whole here will draw from all of those disciplines.
The purpose of this course is to explore the unexamined principles and assumptions that underpin our views on science and culture. When we classify something as knowledge, we are implicitly appealing to a system of values: what is known is worthwhile, if not for its own sake, at least for its utility. For example, we believe that astronomy expands what we know, but astrology does not. But why? To respond that the former is science while the latter is nonsense merely reiterates our view that they are knowledge and superstition, respectively. The way to make progress on the question of knowledge is to look at three questions:
- What assumptions do we have about knowledge?
- What is scientific knowledge?
- What is knowledge itself?
Department: Interdisciplinary
University: Quest University Canada
Years offered: 2016-2017, 2017-2018