Week 16 · Knowledge, Science & Capstone
How to turn a broad concern into a question, hypothesis, evidence plan, and revisable explanation.
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Scientific reasoning begins when a broad concern becomes a question that can be tested, revised, and argued about with evidence. The capstone starts with question design because evidence cannot rescue a vague or unfalsifiable claim. This week narrows the problem before you invest effort in measurement and writing, making each claim answerable to observation and competing explanations.
A research question can quietly contain its preferred answer. Inspect its wording for assumed causes, moral conclusions, or undefined populations.
What observation would make your preferred explanation less plausible?
Start with the aims and questions so the readings have a purpose.
Use the prompt under each source to produce notes, not highlights alone.
Test the ideas through observation, analysis, or a small intervention.
Save the deliverables and check your work against the completion criteria.
Define what you are trying to understand before deciding that you have understood it.
Before reading, write the smallest version of your capstone question that could still be answered with visible evidence.
Core material
5 guided readings, in the order shown.
Peter Godfrey-Smith · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Questions about hypothesis, evidence, experiment, explanation, and the logic of scientific inquiry.
Read the introduction and sections on confirmation, experimentation, and scientific change. Extract a reusable evidence checklist.
Rose M. Spielman and contributors · OpenStax
Research questions, scientific literacy, ethics, descriptive methods, correlation, and experiments in psychology.
Read sections 2.1-2.3. Make a table comparing description, correlation, and experiment, including what each can and cannot establish.
Noba Project contributors · Noba Project
An expert-written introduction to judging the quality of psychological claims, evidence, explanations, and scientific conclusions.
Use the module to audit the language of your research question for hidden assumptions and overclaiming.
CORE Econ · CORE Econ
Hands-on projects using public data to develop basic data handling, statistical reasoning, and empirical economic analysis.
Choose one project or dataset relevant to your case. Inspect how the question, variables, data source, and method are connected before importing any result into the capstone.
Thomas S. Kuhn · University of Chicago Press
Kuhn's influential account of paradigms, normal science, anomalies, crises, and scientific revolutions.
Read chapters 1-4. Write a short comparison between Kuhn's normal science and the more straightforward problem-solving picture in your methods notes.
7 study actions turn the reading into observable work.
Optional resources for going further after the reading plan.
A rigorous philosophy-of-science overview of what models are, how they represent, and how they relate to theories.
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