Critical Thinking

This course is an introduction to critical reasoning. Students acquire the tools and concepts needed to analyze and evaluate arguments encountered in everyday life, and in the more technical contexts of their further academic studies. They learn how to recognize arguments by type, and to reconstruct them clearly and fairly in order to assess their rational strength. The sorts of topics covered include the analysis of common fallacies, the resolution of ambiguities, deductive validity and varieties of inductive support, probabilistic reasoning, decision theory, inductive generalization, causal reasoning, and hypothesis confirmation. The course will be of benefit to all students who want to develop their logical skills.