Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An introduction to the evaluation of arguments as they are encountered in everyday life. The central aim will be to sharpen skills of reasoning and argumentation by understanding how arguments work and learning to distinguish those which actually prove what they set out to show from those which do not. Open to all students. Students with credit for PHIL XX1 may not take this course for further credit. Q/Breadth-Social Sci/Sciences.

COURSE DETAILS:

Critical thinking means different things to different people. In this course, it means tools and skills for thinking clearly and reasoning well. Some of these skills are analytic: understanding, representing, and using patterns and methods of reasoning. And some of these skills are evaluative: judging the quality of that reasoning.

This is a course about how to think, and how to understand others’ thinking, not what to think. It will not give you a bunch of facts to memorize, and the exams will mostly not test you on facts. Facts matter! The ultimate purpose of clear thinking and good reasoning is to find, understand, and communicate truth. But our goal is to develop thinking skills you can use to get true beliefs and avoid false ones, in all areas of your life.

We’ll always need some true beliefs to begin with. If we start with too many false beliefs, reasoning skills alone will not be enough. But if we care about truth and are willing to learn about the world so that we have some facts to reason with, the tools of critical thinking are very powerful. Developing them requires hard work, but it’s worth the effort. These tools empower us to better understand the world around us, to recognize when we should change our beliefs, to find and criticize errors in reasoning, and to clearly organize, express, and defend our thoughts. So get ready to think!

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

•  Read and reconstruct arguments.
•  Write valid deductive arguments.
•  Identify counterexamples and formulate objections.
•  Reconstruct explanatory and confirmation reasoning.
•  Recognize and criticize common forms of confirmation bias.
•  Apply rules of probability in simple quantitative problems and for hypothesis testing.
•  Evaluate reasoning by analogy.
•  Explain the relevance of sample size and the problem of a biased sample.
•  Evaluate causal reasoning in informal and scientific (controlled experiment) contexts.
•  Formulate and diagram causal explanations.

PHIL 105 may be applied towards the Quantitative Requirement, and the Breadth-Social Sciences Requirement OR the Breadth-Science Requirement (but not both; student can choose which Breadth requirement to satisfy and plan enrollment in other courses accordingly).

Note: PHIL 105 has replaced PHIL XX1. If you have taken PHIL XX1 in the past and you enroll in PHIL 105, it will be considered a repeat.

Videos: Why Study Philosophy? and Meet our professors!

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

We’ll use i-Clickers (henceforth “clickers”) in lectures. Clickers allow everyone in our large room to respond to multiple choice questions during class, and allow me to show response statistics to the class. Every clicker question is scored for participation, and some are scored for correctness. The total clicker mark for the course (10%) is approximately 6 pts for participation and 4 pts your correctness. The difference between getting every question right and getting every question wrong is normally less than the mark range of a single
letter grade.

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: