Residential College students are given priority in all Residential College courses during the Early Registration and registration periods, and from waitlists. RC courses which satisfy specific Residential College graduation requirement are reserved for RC students only (e.g., RC language courses).
Waitlists of Residential College courses are maintained in the Residential College Counseling Office, 134 Tyler, East Quad. When a course fills, students should contact the RC Counseling Office (647-4359) to be placed on a waitlist if one is being maintained.
RC sections of LS&A courses
These sections will be letter graded for all students
Chem 130, Sections 111 General Chemistry, Macroscopic Investigations & Reaction Principles.
Students must elect lecture Section 100 in conjunction with this course. See Chemistry 130.
Chem 210 Section 190 Structure & Reactivity.
Students must elect lecture section 211 in conjunction with this course.See Chemistry 210.
Math 115 Section 110 Analytical Geometry & Calculus.
See Math 115.
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343. Scientific Change. Any introductory science course. (4). (NS). (BS).
This course examines the development of a major debate about the nature of science that began in the 1960s and continues today. The course begins by examining the empiricist view of science that dominated both philosophy and science before 1960 and remains today deeply embedded in the general culture. According to this traditional conception of science, the purpose of scientific inquiry is to produce an objective account of the natural world that existed independently of the inquiry. The application of scientific method ensures the progressive elimination of error and bias in a movement towards an ever more complete picture of the natural world. (In other words, universal truth will eventually out.)
This traditional view of science was strongly challenged in the 1960s most prominently by historian of science Thomas Kuhn who argued, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), that observation is irremediably "theory-laden", and that science, far from following a logic of development, progresses through irrational changes in what Kuhn called "paradigms" (thereby launching a new usage in the English language). The course will explore the ways in which the work of Kuhn and others stimulated research in the history and sociology of science purporting to show that science is as much a product of its social and cultural environment as an account of natural phenomena.
In the final part of the course, we examine some post-structuralist positions on the nature of knowledge, claims that have been stimulated in part by Kuhn's ideas and that have recently claimed some adherents in the history and sociology of science. These positions are far more radical - some would say nihilistic - than the position Kuhn developed. But can they be sustained? And, if not, are there ways to conceptualize scientific knowledge that escape the forms of reductionism that characterize traditional empiricism on the one hand and post-structuralism on the other? The central issues addressed in the course are examined with reference to case studies drawn from the history of physics and biology. There will be guest lectures given by scientists and social scientists. (Olwell)
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