The Art of Judgment

This course is a training in a single faculty — weighing — built up one question at a time: how sure should I be, where did this claim come from, what kind of evidence is this, is a vivid story standing in for a pattern, what's the denominator, is correlation being sold as cause, is a move being run to fake strength. Where its logic-course partner gives valid form, Judgment gives real-world weight; the epistemics are modern (calibration, base rates, source quality) and the lineage classical, honored by use. The verdict here is on the method: the course rules openly on how to weigh — which sources hold up, what a denominator does to a true number, when a vivid case is standing in for a pattern. On the live claims it uses as specimens, the call is the student's — a scope decision about this course, not a shrug: he watches the method run, then reaches and defends his own call, and graders assess the honesty of the weighing. Manipulation is taught as mechanism a kid can catch, never as grievance about a shadowy "them" — the aim is a student harder to fool and calmer for it.

Each lesson is a focused read built on worked examples and a weighing drill, plus a 20-minute applied write, with examples rotating across scientific claims, consumer choices, historical controversies, and builders' decisions. The questions accumulate into a checklist, and the final unit runs all eight on one live, messy claim end to end.

Designed as a pair. Take The Art of Judgment first and The Art of Choosing second, and together they earn 0.5 credit in Practical Reason — a single half-credit course on the transcript, with a practicum running across both quarters. Either may be taken alone for 0.25 credit; what a single quarter cannot give is the practicum's synthesis, where a claim you weighed in the first quarter becomes a decision you make in the second.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.