Friday afternoon

I said I would return to previous themes, and I've been painting (house) this week, which has given me time to ruminate. (There's a relevant Nietzsche quote that belongs there, but I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment, and far enough out from my book to be able to pull it up from memory.)
Last time I wrote, "I neither expect nor really want my students to ponder epistemological questions, but there's something important about flexing those muscles." There are two pieces there that probably need clarification.
First, I do want my students to ponder epistemological questions. However, I usually tell them that the great skeptic Hume liked to drink beer and shoot pool (more or less true) and didn't spend his life paralyzed by questions of causation. Being aware that there are various ways of approaching questions, different ways of gathering and analyzing evidence, is very important; and to a certain extent, understanding the difference between foundationalism (Stanford and IEP) and coherentism (IEP and Stanford) is also useful - but practical matters take precedence, and getting bogged down isn't useful, and even serious philosophers don't wrestle with Descartes' dream argument in their everyday lives.
I say this partly because I received an essay (9 pages long, when the assignment was 3-5 pages - a bad start) that included the following:

Let A=K*E1 with K being the fundamental constant that converts the experience, E, to knowledge.

[If this is your essay and you want me to identify you as the author, let me know. But I'm pointing out your idiocy here, and still wondering if you were stoned when you wrote it.]

For those of you who are unfamiliar with epistemology - a group which includes the author of this quote - the "fundamental constant, K" is basically what philosophers have been arguing about for millennia. To think that it can be captured in a constant and dropped into an essay is merely to demonstrate that you haven't been to class or read the text. So, I really do want my students to think about problems in epistemology, but do so seriously when they do, and not to become paralyzed or go to graduate school to study epistemology further.

The second part is about flexing mental muscles. I may have mentioned that my students at an unnamed Syracuse-area college (which was not Syracuse University) seemed unfamiliar with the idea of thinking. That is, I would point to a sentence in the text, and asked what the author might have meant, and they would repeat the sentence back almost verbatim. I would read their essay drafts, and say, "this needs further clarification," and they would be unable to add anything at all. (This was multiple students, over the course of the semester.) I don't particularly care if they understand the ins and outs of Kant's epistemology or Nietzsche's critique of it - it would be nice, and probably helpful for them, but they're not philosophers - but I wonder how they process the news, or if they can even tell the difference between content and advertisement, information and opinion, or informed opinion and dogma. Epistemology matters; but as I said last time, it's not precisely Kant that I want you to learn.