Stephen Bloch-Schulman
Philosophy

Elon University

On Philosophical Evidence-Mindedness
and Its Development

Original Statement

I teach philosophy at the college level and find that students do not understand (or do not fully understand) how to read, write and think in an evidence-minded way and that, because argument and the evaluation of evidence is the central schema of doing philosophy, that learning how to teach it better is essential to the most effective teaching of philosophy.  But what it is, how it looks, and the various stages of its development are still only hazily or theoretically known, and I want to explore philosophical evidence-mindedness as a concrete phenomenon. The guiding question in this project, therefore, is: How can we better teach philosophical evidence-mindedness?

Subsidiary to these subsidiary questions are the following: What is philosophical evidence-mindedness?  What separates philosophical evidence-mindedness from other forms of evidence-mindedness?  Are there stages in the development of philosophical evidence-mindedness and, if there are, what are they?  What would philosophical evidence-mindedness look like in practice, what signs are there that it exists or is absent for a particular person at a particular time?  How can I teach it, and how can I teach it in a way that transfers outside of the philosophy classroom into other classes and into extracurricular life?

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