Cluster: Knowledge, Values and Rationality

The theme of the cluster is the nature of rationality and its emergence from the interplay of knowledge and values.  The curriculum explores the major forms that human rationality takes in the acquisition of knowledge, logical inference, moral reasoning, decision making, and societal organizations and policy. Individual courses focus on models of rationality as such and conceptualizations of rationality in areas such as logic and inference, natural and social sciences, biomedicine and psychiatry, social and political theory, low, educational policy, societal value conflicts, and moral theorizing including everyday ethical dilemmas. Human rationality is also approached from a comparative perspective that includes machine and animal learning including broader evolutionary perspectives. Finally, cluster courses offer critical perspective on perennial and popular doctrines that endorse non-rational or irrational approaches to existential and ethical questions, politics, and scientific inquiry.

Cluster Coordinator:   Tom Seppalainen
Office:  NH 393
Phone:  503.725.3519
E-mail:  seppalt@pdx.edu 

Sophomore Inquiry: Knowledge, Values and Rationality

(UNST 239)

The cluster invites students to think critically about their value decisions, factual beliefs, policies that govern local institutions , and the norms and principles of the culture and society they represent and habit; it is designed to develop students’ meta-cognitive skills and encourages the use of these skills throughout students’ academic experience; it introduces students to an interdisciplinary perspective on rationality, one that employs methods, concepts, insights, and perspectives from philosophy, history and philosophy of science, psychology, sociology, criminal justice, economics, physics, and systems science.

This SINQ leads to the Knowledge, Values and Rationality Cluster.

Approved Cluster Courses:

Academic Year 13-14

Note: Courses listed below are all Approved Cluster Courses for the 2013 - 2014 year.  If you are looking for listings for 2012 - 2013, they are archived here.