Spring 2023 PHIL-P 105 Critical Thinking (Indiana University)

What This Course is About

Critical thinking is a skill necessary to succeed in college and life. This course helps you master critical thinking tips and techniques that you can apply to a wide variety of topics and disciplines. The overall goal of this course is to help you recognize common biases and mistakes in reasoning and acquire general and widely applicable tips and methods to reason better. We will address questions such as:

1. What biases can prevent us from reasoning well and accurately assessing evidence?

2. What is an argument, and how can we strengthen our arguments?

3. When the evidence we possess does not clearly favor one theory over another, how can we decide between them?

4. How can we improve the accuracy of our generalizations?

5. What conditions allow us to infer that one event causes another?

6. What is evidence, and how should evidence increase or decrease our confidence in hypotheses?

What Skills You Can Improve in This Course

1. Improving your reasoning skills. In learning general tips and methods for reasoning, you can improve your ability to reason. But taking this course does not automatically make you a better reasoner. That requires practice, working to avoid biases, and learning more about the world around you. Philosopher and logician Susan Stebbing put it well when she said:

The study of logic does not in itself suffice to enable us to reason correctly, still less to think clearly where our passionate beliefs are concerned. Thinking is an activity of the whole personality. Given, however, a desire to be reasonable, then a knowledge of the conditions to which all sound thinking must conform will enable us to avoid certain mistakes into which we are prone to fall. There is such a thing as a habit of sound reasoning. This habit may be acquired by consciously attending to the logical principles of sound reasoning, in order to apply them to test the soundness of particular arguments. (Logic in Practice, vii–viii)

In this class we will look at some of the “logical principles of sound reasoning” she mentions. With practice and collaboration both inside and outside of the classroom, you can instill a habit of using those principles and reason better.

2. Improving your memory, concentration, and problem-solving skills. Many of the general methods of reasoning we will learn involve the applications of rules and general formulas. These methods are mechanical procedures, akin to rules for mathematical calculations or instructions for building an IKEA couch. Mastering our methods have the same virtues as mastering other mechanical procedures.

Mastering mechanical procedures improves memory. Mastering a mechanical system requires mastering many different rules. You will have to know these rules by heart.

Mastering mechanical procedures improves concentration. It takes focus to screw in a bolt in a hard-to-reach place, or to solve for unknowns in a complicated equation.

Mastering mechanical procedures improves problem-solving skills. Learning how to apply mechanical procedures requires reflection and trial and error to solve problems—we have to think about which tools to use to build something—some work better than others.

This brings me to a separate but important point: these tools can be mastered by anyone, provided you put the work into learning how to use them. Anyone can build an IKEA couch if they follow the rules and have a little bit of physical strength. No insight or “genius” (if that concept even makes sense) is necessary. But our general reasoning methods do one better—no physical strength is needed. The skills you all have as college students already equip you to master these rules. No one is naturally talented at doing critical thinking, just like no one is naturally talented at building an IKEA couch. There is absolutely no obstacle to any of you mastering our tools!

Modules and Learning Objectives

Our class is split up into six modules, guided by concrete learning objectives. Each module ends on the Monday of a particular week (except the last module), where we wrap up and review the module’s material. The tentative schedule is given for each module.

Each module is associated with two assignments: a quiz and a short response assignment. The online quiz becomes available Monday at 5PM on the last day of the module and must be completed by the start of class that Wednesday. Students have 25 minutes to complete it once started. The questions for the short response assignment are available by Friday afternoon before the module’s last Monday and are also due by the start of Wednesday—there is no time limit to answer questions.

Starting with the assignments for Module 2, short response assignments include one question from the previous short response assignment of the student’s choosing on which the student did not receive full credit (assuming students did not get a perfect score).

Module 1: Mindset (Wednesday of Week 1, Week 2, Week 3 (no class on Monday due to Labor Day), and Monday of week 4).

Objectives: Students will identify common cognitive biases that inhibit good reasoning, define and apply a three-part mindset for reasoning better, and identify arguments and the structure of arguments.

Resources: Reason Better, Chapters 1, 2, and 3. Optional chapter questions and quiz questions in Reason Better from Chapters 1, 2, and 3.

Module 2: Evaluating Arguments (Wed of Week 4, Week 5, Mon of Week 6):

Objectives: Students will identify the two general ways of evaluating an argument, define and apply the notions of suppositional strength and deductive validity, and learn deductively valid argument forms for demonstrating deductive validity.

Resources: Reason Better, Chapters 3 and 4. Optional chapter questions and quiz questions in Reason Better from Chapters 3 and 4. LSAT practice test questions which involve deductive reasoning.

Module 3: Evidence (Wed of Week 6, Week 7, Week 8, Mon of Week 9):

Objectives: Students will define and apply the notion of evidence for a hypothesis, define strength of evidence and learn how to measure strength of evidence, and use these tools to explain rigorously some common errors in reasoning with evidence.

Resources: Reason Better, Chapter 5. Optional chapter and quiz questions in Reason Better from Chapter 5.

Module 4: Evidence and Confidence (Wed of Week 9, Week 10, Mon of Week 11):

Objectives: Students will learn the updating rule—a rule for changing our confidence in a hypothesis when we get new evidence—and learn how coherence and simplicity help assign confidence to hypotheses before getting new evidence.

Resources: Reason Better, Chapter 8. Optional chapter questions and quiz questions in Reason Better from Chapter 8.

Module 5: Generalization and Correlation (Wed of Week 11, Week 12, Mon of Week 13):

Objectives: Students will define and apply the notion of statistical generalization, define sampling biases and acquire techniques for overcoming them, identify some common errors in generalizing such as stereotyping, and define and identify correlations.

Resources: Reason Better, Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 Section 1 and 2. Optional chapter questions and quiz questions in Reason Better from Chapters 6 and 7.

Module 6: From Correlation to Causation (Wed of Week 13, Week 14, Week 15 [Assignments due during finals week].):

Objectives: Students will define five common pitfalls in reasoning from correlation to causation and learn about techniques for overcoming such pitfalls, such as randomized controlled trials.

Resources: Reason Better, Chapter 7 Section 3, Optional chapter questions and quiz questions in Reason Better from Chapter 7. LSAT practice test questions on causal inferences.