@hawkeye10,
Quote:that's it? you cant think of even one thought which might add to the discussion??
Hawkeye a lot of people on this website should sign up for this free online Duke University course in my opinion.
Come to think of it would be kind of fun to have the two professors looks at the tactics that Firefly love to use here.
https://www.coursera.org/#course/thinkagain
Think Again: How to Reason and Argue
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Ram Neta
Reasoning is important. This course will teach you how to do it well. You will learn how to understand and assess arguments by other people and how to construct good arguments of your own about whatever matters to you.
November 2012 (12 weeks long)
Workload: 5-6 hours/week
Humanities and Social Sciences
About the Course
Reasoning is important. This course will teach you how to do it well. You will learn some simple but vital rules to follow in thinking about any topic at all and some common and tempting mistakes to avoid in reasoning. We will discuss how to identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments by other people (including politicians, used car salesmen, and teachers) and how to construct arguments of your own in order to help you decide what to believe or what to do. These skills will be useful in dealing with whatever matters most to you.
About the Instructor(s)
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (right) is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Philosophy Department and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and Core Faculty in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. He has served as vice-chair of the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association and co-director of the MacArthur Project on Law and Neuroscience. He has published books on moral theory, philosophy of religion, theory of knowledge, and informal logic. His current research focuses on ways that psychology and neuroscience can illuminate moral beliefs and moral responsibility. He has regularly taught a course on reasoning for three decades.
Ram Neta (left) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published dozens of articles on various topics in epistemology, including the nature and extent of our knowledge, the constraints that rationality imposes of on our states of confidence, the sorts of considerations that can serve as evidence for us, and how arguments for skepticism can come to seem compelling. He has also edited a number of recent and forthcoming volumes in epistemology. His current research focuses on understanding how epistemic constraints on an animal’s representational states can be determined by the essential properties of the species to which the animal belongs.
Course Syllabus
•Week One: How to Spot an Argument (and separate it from surrounding verbiage)
•Week Two: How to Untangle an Argument (or break it into parts and tell what different parts are doing)
•Week Three: How to Reconstruct an Argument (or arrange its parts to show how they are connected in a structure)
•Week Four: How to Evaluate an Argument Deductively (or determine whether its conclusion follows validly from its premises) – Part 1: Propositional Logic
•Week Five: How to Evaluate an Argument Deductively (or determine whether its conclusion follows validly from its premises) – Part 2: Quantificational Logic
•Week Six: How to Evaluate an Argument Inductively (or assess whether its premises provide enough reason to believe its conclusion) – Part 1: Statistical Generalization and Application
•Week Seven: How to Evaluate an Argument Inductively (or assess whether its premises provide enough reason to believe its conclusion) – Part 2: Causal Reasoning
•Week Eight: How to Evaluate an Argument Inductively (or assess whether its premises provide enough reason to believe its conclusion) – Part 3: Probability
•Week Nine: How to Evaluate an Argument Inductively (or assess whether its premises provide enough reason to believe its conclusion) – Part 4: Decisions
•Week Ten: How to Mess Up an Argument (or commit common but tempting fallacies) – Part 1: Vagueness and Ambiguity
•Week Eleven: How to Mess Up an Argument (or commit common but tempting fallacies) – Part 2: Irrelevance
•Week Twelve: How to Mess Up an Argument (or commit common but tempting fallacies) – Part 3: Vacuity
Recommended Background
This material is appropriate for introductory college students or advanced high school students—or, indeed, anyone who is interested. No special background is required other than knowledge of English.
Suggested Readings
Students who want more detailed explanations or additional exercises or who want to explore these topics in more depth should consult Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic. The text is also available in an e-book format.
FAQ
•Will I get a certificate after completing this class?
Yes. Students who successfully complete the class will receive a certificate signed by the instructor.
•What resources will I need for this class?
Only a working computer and internet connection.
•What is the coolest thing I'll learn if I take this class?
Nasty names (equivocator!) to call people who try to fool you with bad arguments.
