Class 1.2: Expectations
The topic for today’s class is ‘setting expectations’. This is a double entendre; we are going to expand on our discussion of course expectations from class 1.1, but we are also going to do our first substantive reading and topic of the semester, on the topic of parental expectations.
Assigned Work
The first thing that I expect all of you to do to prepare for today’s class is to read the course syllabus in full. I distributed it in hard copy in class on Monday, but you can download a PDF of the syllabus here:
Once you have read the syllabus, and the reading, you must complete the Daily Quiz, which should appear embedded below.
The second thing that I expect you to do to prepare for today’s class is to read today’s assigned reading, ‘The Ethics of Expectations’ by the philosopher Rima Basu:
Rima Basu
Rima Basu teaches philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, where she has taught since 2018. Before that, she completed her PhD in philosophy here at USC. Basu works on topics about the morality of thought, and is most famous for convincing many people that it is possible to wrong someone by what you believe about them.
Rima Basu
It helps for context to understand that Basu’s previous work is about whether and how you can wrong someone by what you believe about them, in order to understand why she mentions this on the first page of her paper. In some ways, the paper that we are reading for today is easier to get into than most contemporary journal articles in philosophy, because Basu is introducing a new topic that has not been explored by others. But all journal articles try to justify to their readers why their topic is important by comparing it to existing research, and that often makes it feel, when you try to read an article about something new, like you are walking into the middle of a conversation. So you may feel this way at first when you start Basu’s article, but stick with it and I think that you will find her topic interesting and easy to related to, even if you don’t catch everything that she is trying to say about it, especially the places where she is referring or alluding to other topics.
The Ethics of Expectations
The paper that we are reading for this class is not about the ethics of belief, but it is about a closely related topic - the ethics of expectations. It is controversial in philosophy whether it can ever be morally wrong simply to have thoughts, ideas, attitudes, or emotions about someone, independently of whether you act on those thoughts. So Basu expects the idea that expectations can be morally problematic to be controversial and surprising to her intended audience. But she wants to convince her reader that the expectations that you have about someone else are also not morally indifferent - what you expect of someone can wrong them just as how you treat them can wrong them. She wants to convince us of this, and then ask some interesting questions that follow if we agree with her.
Throughout the paper, Basu sometimes uses words that she expects the readers of a contemporary philosophy journal article to be familiar with, but which you will find unfamiliar because you don’t have prior training in philosophy. For example, on page 152 Basu uses the words ‘Moore-paradoxical’. This is a reference to what is known as ‘Moore’s Paradox’, which is that it is paradoxical to say ‘P but I don’t believe that P’ or ‘I believe that P but not P’ even though each of these things could easily be true. There are different ways of trying to explain why it doesn’t make sense to say these things, but a simple one is that even though they can be true, the person saying them can’t know them to be true.
In general, when you find words that look like you are supposed to understand them but don’t, you should highlight them in your printed copy of the paper so that you can go back to them and check to see if you need to understand them in order to understand what is going on in the paper, or you can read around them to get the basic idea even though you don’t follow that particular point, exactly.
You can find the reading at the link below. I STRONGLY recommend printing it out so that you can read it on paper and mark it up with a pen and highlighter. Studies show that everyone - even professional researchers - understand less and retain less when they read things on a screen than when reading on paper. Reading on a screen triggers all of your carefully formed habits of skimming over things that serve you well when doomscrolling social media, but are exactly the wrong habits to have when the point is to digest and understand something carefully.
Daily Quiz
Finally, once you complete the reading, you must complete the Daily Quiz. The Daily Quiz closes after class starts and cannot be taken late because it contains time-sensitive material that you need to go through before class in order to be ready. All Daily Quizzes are handled by ClassMarker.com, but will be embedded in the homework assignment on the calendar on IvoryTower.Academy, just like this one.