Teaching statistics to social scientists

This chapter provides advice on how to teach applied regression and multilevel models to students from a broad set of fields, especially the social sciences. These students typically want to fit and understand models beyond what they get from computer output. They tend to be highly motivated because they are trying to solve real problems in their applied fields. The course has little mathematics, and instead employs the computer to fit and simulate models. The chapter provides a step-by-step plan of the first two weeks of classroom activities in this applied regression course.

Introspection and Belief

Introspection is necessary for knowing what conscious mental events a person has in his or her mind. This is all the feeling theory of belief asks it to do. Denying or neglecting this is one source of eliminativism. The explanations we offer for our own thoughts, emotions, preferences, choices, beliefs, desires, motives, statements, and actions, which seem to come from introspection, are unreliable. Introspection also gives us a set of potent intuitions, which include some of philosophy’s most intransigent problems — that time flows, that mind and body are dual, that mental events are immaterial, and the intuition on which this book depends, the intuition that conscious mental events cause behaviour. The chapter ends with a comment on the uniqueness of mental events, and their difference from a computer output.