FYS: The Ends of Truth

3 Credits.

In a moment when social fragmentation and the easy dissemination of “alternative facts” make deliberation and popular consensus elusive, objectivity seems like a relic of a different era. However, truth and the proper means of determining it have always been contested. This course asks whether our moment is unique. Is truth merely a noble dream – an unreachable ideal – or something real that can be grasped? If the latter, how do we attain it?In this First-Year Seminar, students will learn how scholars theorized concepts such as science, society, identity, and modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries by making them into objects of study and creating “disciplines” around them. As they learn about the foundations of our modern academic enterprise, students will survey a variety of the humanistic and social scientific fields that they can study at Johns Hopkins, learning how different disciplines pose questions about the world while trying out the intellectual tools they employ. Students will read and discuss important theoretical and methodological texts for the fields surveyed as well as research in which they are applied to concrete questions, providing an opportunity to investigate the connection between theory and the production of knowledge. Finally, students will consider and debate the nature of “expertise,” discussing the function and position of “experts” within contemporary society."