Inferring and Explaining

8 InferrIng and exPlaInIng QuIz one Every other quiz in this course will focus on course content. The majority of the quiz grade will be determined by how successfully you demonstrate your mastery of the material pre- sented in the readings and lectures. This frst quiz, however, is a little diferent. Here, I am asking you to honestly refect on yourself as a thinker. The grade on this quiz will be deter- mined by how sincere and self-refective your essay is. I am asking for a short—no more than three double-spaced pages—essay that addresses the following three questions: 1. How much of your thinking about important issues—political, moral, religious, and so on —do you believe is determined by your individual background? Your age, sex, race, fam- ily political leanings, and the like? 2. To the degree that at least some of your thinking about these kinds of issues is partially determined by these cultural facts about yourself, do you believe that you can “transcend” them and reach a more “objective” evaluation of the way things “really are”? How might you do this? 3. What are your major sources of information about politics, moral controversies, and these sorts of things? I fully expect the grades on this frst quiz to be quite high. All you need to do to receive full credit is to take just a little time to truly refect on these questions. Notes 1 Michael P. Lynch, “Democracy as a Space of Rea- sons,” in Truth in Politics , ed. J. Elkins and A. Norris (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 158. 2 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4–5, 6, 27, 51–52.