Coursera course on critical thinking

post by daenerys · 2012-11-13T02:13:12.719Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 5 comments

Contents

  About the Course: 
  Course Syllabus
None
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Coursera has an upcoming course on critical thinking called "Think Again: How to Reason and Argue". A bunch of the locals here in Columbus will be taking it, and I thought some other LWers might also be interested. If you decide to sign up, let us know, and we might get a discussion group going, or something.

Linky: https://www.coursera.org/course/thinkagain 

Some info from the website:

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.

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

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