Compass: Exploring Value, Truth, and Knowledge
What is truth? How do we know what we know? How do values shape decision-making? Learn critical thinking skills for interpreting information, drawing valid inferences, and navigating difficult decisions using tools from philosophy, history, economics, and data science.
Course Information
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About this Course
As humans, what do we value (and why)? What do we know (and how do we know it)? These are some essential parts of life that every one of us must grapple with, whether we work with data or just use it to make decisions in our everyday lives. And because we as individuals live with and depend on one another, we must know how to think, have conversations, and make decisions together.
This online course from the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences will introduce you to some of the fundamental questions behind everyday decisions we make about what is important to us, what is real and true, and what we believe. We will explore some of the different answers that great thinkers have offered, and learn skills, methods, and habits from the humanities and social sciences for how you can listen, converse, reflect, and work out answers to these questions.
We hope this course can serve as a “compass” to help point you in the right direction when you are grappling with difficult questions and need to look for approaches and frameworks that can help you work out answers.
What you'll learn
- Philosophical value frameworks, and how to identify your own values
- Grounding in philosophical understanding of truth, and how we know what is true
- Understanding of what “truth” means in science, and how science builds claims about the world
- Rubrics for evaluating statistics and metrics, and whether they are useful and meaningful
Prerequisites
None
Meet your instructors
Lily Tsai
Ford Professor of Political Science
Lily Tsai, Ford Professor of Political Science, is a scholar of governance, accountability, and political behavior and is engrossed by the strategies that ordinary people use to influence government authorities even in the absence of strong democratic institutions, how authorities and elites seek to influence and control the behavior of their constituents, and how to create public trust and trustworthiness that lead to constructive engagement and cooperation between citizens and government. At its core, Lily’s research seeks to understand when authorities provide what people need and want, and why they often fail to do so. In particular, her work looks closely at what can be done to improve trust and cooperation, and how to increase the motivation of authorities to respond to citizen needs. Lily founded the MIT Governance Lab (MIT OV/LAB) in 2016 to respond to students who seek an active role in solving public problems and engaging in civic life, while also producing rigorous scientific research. Outside of social science and governance innovation, Lily enjoys running (though her knees now require her to run shorter distances), practicing the piano, and hiking. Big Sur and the Aletsch Glacier are two of her favorite places to visit. Learn more about Lily here.
