Sense & Sensibility & Science

Undergraduate / Graduate

In Sense & Sensibility & Science, you will learn how to better incorporate into your thinking and decision making the problem-solving techniques of science at its best. Many insights and conceptual tools from scientific thinking are of great utility for solving problems in your own day-to-day life. Yet, as individuals, as groups, as whole societies we fail to take full advantage of these methods. The focus in this course is on the errors humans tend to make, and the approaches scientific methodology has developed (and continues to develop) to minimize those errors. The course includes a discussion of the nature of science, what makes science such an effective way of knowing, how both non-scientific thinking and scientific thinking can go awry, and how we can reason more clearly and successfully as individuals, as members of groups, and as citizens of a democracy. This undergraduate course is simultaneously taught at UC Berkeley, Harvard and UChicago in spring. UChicago's course, premiered in 2024, built on a decade of experience developing and teaching the popular course at Berkeley and Harvard's adoption of its own version in 2021.