PHIL-103 Critical Thinking

Credits 3 / 3 Contact Hours
Pre-requisite: Placement into RDNG-016 (ACSR-016), ACLT-075 or ACLT-076
Methods for evaluating claims and arguments with special emphasis on arguments in everday life such as those found in newspaper articles political speeches and advertisements. Students will learn to determine whether there are good reasons for accepting a claim even when those reasons have not been set forth explicitly. The course will cover induction deduction informal fallacies and other aspects of critical thinking and reasoning.

Course Outcomes
1. Identify arguments and distinguish arguments from non-arguments 2. Recognize and analyze emotive and cognitive content in arguments, and generate arguments that avoid reliance on emotive content 3. Analyze and generate common types of extensional and intensional definitions, understand common uses of definitions in arguments, and avoid common problems in generating definitions 4. Recognize and analyze categorical and propositional deductive arguments and generate valid deductive arguments avoiding common fallacies 5. Recognize and analyze inductive arguments and generate strong inductive arguments avoiding common fallacies 6. Recognize and analyze common informal fallacies and generate arguments that avoid them 7. Analyze complex arguments made in ordinary language 8. Recognize some of the more important strengths and limitations of logic in computer applications