In his book, A Manual for Creating Atheists, Peter Boghossian introduced Street Epistemology (SE) to the world nearly a decade ago. SE is a non-confrontational way to help people clarify what they believe and why they believe it. By asking Socratic-style questions, SE helps people calibrate the confidence in their beliefs to the reasons and evidence they have for holding those beliefs.

A movement formed around SE, with participants initially focused on engaging claims by religious fundamentalists. Since then, new forms of irrational thinking not bound to religious fundamentalism have emerged. These have been actively undermining our institutions.

When Peter developed SE, Critical Social Justice had not yet weaved its way into society. But the epistemological strategies and techniques he developed—and the SE community improved upon and added to—are just as timeless and relevant with this new epistemological threat as they were with older, more established belief systems.

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The nonpartisan Dartmouth Political Union hosted our Reverse Q&A visit to Dartmouth College in May. In this highlight video, we hear interviews with students before and after the event and excerpts from spectrum conversations. Claims explored include: The consideration of race should be removed from the college admission process; Speech is violence; and, ‘My body, my choice’ should be consistent for vaccines and abortions. Attendees offered a variety of claims to consider, and we see Peter Boghossian use a variation of the Delphi technique with the audience to achieve consensus regarding which to discuss.

Full spectrum conversations from Dartmouth College are here [https://www.youtube.com/c/drpeterboghossian/playlists] under the “Social Justice Reverse Q&A” playlist. The playlist includes claims discussed at this event and elsewhere on campus during our visit.

Footage from this event was filmed on May 4, 2022 at Dartmouth College.

We hoped to partner with liberal and conservative student groups at every university on the Reverse Q&A tour. This proved to be a challenge. At Colorado State University Fort Collins, we partnered with the conservative group, TPUSA. We were delighted that this group wanted to include multiple viewpoints at the event, and we were able to create an ideologically diverse panel with conservatives and libertarian socialists. In this video, we see an excerpt from this thoughtful panel discussion.
 
We also hear pre- and post-event comments from attendees and excerpts from our spectrum conversations. We have published several full conversations from our visit to CSU here [https://www.youtube.com/c/drpeterboghossian/playlists] in the “Social Justice Reverse Q&A” playlist.
 
This footage was recorded at Colorado State University Fort Collins on April 26, 2022.