Oct 15
Engaging Across Viewpoints Lecture Series - Beyond civility: Honing reason to create safe spaces for dangerous ideas
The Office of the President and the Division of Inclusion, Equity, and Community are pleased to announce the inaugural Engaging Across Viewpoints Lecture Series presented by Dr. Simon Cullen.
Beyond civility: Honing reason to create safe spaces for dangerous ideas
Liberal arts presents an inspiring and demanding vision of education, but colleges aren’t living up to its promises. It aims to foster the development of higher reasoning skills, such as the ability to engage seriously with opposing viewpoints, as well as virtues like intellectual humility and curiosity. But even the best colleges have limited impact on students’ topic-neutral critical thinking skills. And far from providing spaces for fearless debate of challenging ideas, intolerant campus speech cultures have led many students (and faculty) to conclude that the value of openly discussing controversial topics is outweighed by the social and academic risks.
In this talk, I’ll explain how I set out to test a 165-year-old hypothesis in the psychology of reasoning and ended up teaching a viral philosophy class called Dangerous Ideas in Science and Society. Using live polls and student data, I’ll explore the effects of self-censorship on academic freedom and the contradictions implicit in how students often think about speech and education. Finally, I’ll share practical, easy-to-use tools backed by empirical research and my own classroom experience. These tools can help us reach beyond mere civility: to understand, discuss, and evaluate controversial arguments more deeply and with less bias.
Simon Cullen is an Assistant Professor and Dietrich College AI and Education Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. His research and teaching combine philosophy, cognitive science, and educational technology to improve reasoning, communication, and understanding across moral and political divides. His work has been published in Science Advances, Cognition, Nature Science of Learning, and the Review of Philosophy and Psychology. He has a background in ethics, moral psychology, the psychology of reasoning, and the philosophy of cognitive science, and he holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University.
To learn more about Dr. Cullen, visit his webpage.
Lecture will be followed by lunch.