Course Syllabus

What's this course about?

Course Structure

We are constantly being given reasons to do and believe things: to believe that we should buy a product, support a cause, accept a job, judge someone innocent or guilty, that fairness requires us to do some household chore, and so on. Assessing the reasons we are given to do or believe these things calls upon us to think critically and logically.

Even though we’re called upon to use our critical and logical thinking skills all the time, most of us are not that good at it. This course aims to help you develop and improve these skills.

You’ll learn how to:

- identify and avoid common thinking mistakes that lead to the formation of bad beliefs;

- recognise, reconstruct and evaluate arguments;

- use basic logical tools to analyse arguments;

- and apply those tools in areas including science, moral theories and law.

Associate Professor Tim Dare and Dr Patrick Girard from the University of Auckland take us on an informative and engaging twelve week journey through the worlds of logical and critical thinking helping us to avoid these common obstacles and fallacies and improve our logical and critical thinking skills.

Throughout the course, Tim and Patrick provide videos, articles, and assignments to lead us through the thickets of logical and critical thinking.

We will spend the first half of the course exploring key concepts in logical and critical thinking. In the second half of the course, we will apply those concepts in familiar areas, to help you develop practical and useful logical and critical thinking skills.

We begin, in the first week, with an introduction to logical and critical thinking and common obstacles and fallacies.

In week two Patrick introduces arguments. We learn to identify premises and conclusions – components of a good argument – and by the end of this week we'll be able to construct an argument in standard form.

In week three we will learn how to distinguish between deductive and non-deductive arguments and about validity, invalidity, strength and weakness.

In week four we examine good and bad arguments in more detail, learning how to tell when an argument is sound or cogent, and how to evaluate an argument.

In week five we take what you've learn to the next level and see how we can apply your new logical and critical thinking skills to long and complex arguments, the kind of arguments that you'll face in the wild.

In week six, we'll focus more closely on fallacies (common bad patterns of reasoning), and see how we can evaluate a real argument, taken from the wild.

After the mid-semester break, we'll examine how logical and critical thinking skills apply in various familiar areas – media, science, law, and morality – that call upon our logical and critical thinking skills in ways appropriate to the particular demands of those areas. We'll also look at further reasoning traps that lead people astray, and in particular those that call upon numeracy expertise. Don't worry, the point is not to teach you complex mathematics, but rather give you tools to recognise when you might be fooled by numbers treated badly.

Finally in the last week we will apply the lessons of the course to another argument in the wild, seeing how the skills we have developed over our 11-week journey can be used in our own lives.

By the end of the course, you will have acquired the basic skills to assess arguments logically and critically, and so to be in a better situation to own the reasons for your beliefs.

We have developed an assessment that supports your learning experience throughout the semester. You'll have weekly quizzes to test your knowledge, and you'll be developing a writing portfolio, a set of 6 exercises that follow your learning steps in the course and get you (we hope!) to write a good argument!