Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An introduction to the tools of reasoning used in everyday life and in science. The overall aim of the course is to understand what makes good reasoning good, what makes bad reasoning bad, and how to do more of the former and less of the latter. Topics include: construction, analysis, and evaluation of arguments; logic and probability; updating beliefs and making decisions; designing experiments; interpreting statistics; identifying fallacies and biases. 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:

This is a course about how to think, and how to understand and evaluate what other people think. It won’t tell you what to think. You won’t prepare for exams by memorizing a lot of facts. Instead, you’ll develop general thinking skills for deciding what to believe and what to do. These are skills for you to use in any situation where having true beliefs matters, either because you simply want to know what’s true or because actions guided by true beliefs are the way best way to achieve your goals. These are also skills for clear and effective communication.

Here’s an overview of what we’ll do in this course:

Arguments

An argument presents reasons to hold a belief. It’s an opportunity to learn from someone else, by seeing that their belief is well-founded. But it’s also an opportunity to discover that someone’s reasons do not support their belief. To take advantage of arguments while minimizing the risk of being misled by them, we need to analyze and evaluate them. To use arguments to show others that we have our own good reasons for a belief, we need skills for constructing and expressing them.

Logic and Probability

Logic and probability include some of the most basic rules of good reasoning. They help us notice when our beliefs should lead us to a new belief and when they conflict with one another. And they help us to see how strongly we should hold a belief based on the strength of our other beliefs, which is crucial for making good decisions and for thinking about risk and reward.

Explanation and Confirmation

Explanation and confirmation are fundamental to scientific thinking, to the careful use of evidence to arrive at reasonable beliefs about the world. There are standard patterns of explanatory and confirmatory reasoning that we can learn to use and recognize. And there are common forms of bias that are difficult to suppress by simple effort but that we can learn to notice and counteract.

Samples and Experiments

We rely on samples to learn about the world from the limited data that’s often available to us, and we’re confronted with their use in the statistics we see every day. They’re also used in the experiments by which we discover causal relationships and work out how to control the world to our advantage, such as in medical and environmental science.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

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.

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: