Articulate specific claims to knowledge as reflections of more general but specifiable approaches to knowing. Evaluate information and concepts critically, dialectically, and self-reflexively, in terms of epistemological and other problems. These exercises supply generalist skills in a specializing university, by identifying the inevitable but hidden epistemological and meta-scientific assumptions throughout the university curriculum and the Department of Communication. This forces their own conflicting, contradictory assumptions to surface as the epistemological confusion that often drives student approaches to course work throughout the department and the university. As practitioners of hypothetical thinking, students are encouraged to apply this awareness to university course work and knowledge claims encountered in everyday life.
Students write papers that analyze and synthesize meta-scientific and epistemological assumptions.
The assignments require students to make available implicit concepts, then to use those concepts as the basis for making connections that can explain the approaches to inquiry involved. The readings are available in the BSU library. An Introduction Explores reductionism, dualism, and dialectical thinking as options explaining the growth of inquiry-movements in twentieth century theories of knowledge, especially as they relate to the social sciences and communication studies. This phase requires a literature review paper, submitted only after qualifying. This phase works from the axiom that a theory of communication is simultaneously a theory of knowledge, i.e., from epistemology.