Role in the General Education Program:
This course satisfies the “Critical Thinking” component of the Basic Skill section of the General Education Program, which recognizes critical reasoning as a fundamental competence. Courses in this section of General Education take reasoning itself as their focus. Their goals are to provide students with criteria and methods for distinguishing good reasoning from bad and to help students develop basic reasoning skills that they can apply both within a broad range of academic disciplines and outside the academic environment. Students are expected to acquire skill in recognizing the logical structure of statements and applying the principles of sound reasoning in the construction and evaluation of arguments, and an appreciation of the value of critical reasoning skills in the pursuit of knowledge.
Goal:
Students will analyze information and ideas carefully and logically from multiple perspectives and develop reasoned solutions to problems.
Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs):
To meet the goals of this section of GE, students will:- Explain and apply the basic concepts essential to critical examination and evaluation of argumentative discourse;
- Use investigative and analytical thinking skills to examine alternatives, explore complex questions and solve challenging problems;
- Synthesize information in order to arrive at reasoned conclusions;
- Evaluate the logic and validity of arguments, and the relevance of data and information;
- Recognize and avoid common logical and rhetorical fallacies.
Course Objectives
The Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) are general skills. The more specific activities through which students will achieve the SLOs are the Course Objectives (COs):- Students will be able to determine whether or not written or oral communication is argumentative.
- Students will identify the parts of arguments − premises and conclusions (including subconclusions and main conclusions) − as they occur in everyday reasoning.
- Students will recognize and produce definitions of the basic concepts used to evaluate arguments: deductive validity, deductive soundness, inductive strength, and inductive cogency.
- Students will translate English arguments into two basic languages used in formal logic, namely, the language of categorical logic and the language of truth-functional logic.
- Students will use Venn diagrams to test categorical syllogisms for deductive validity.
- Students will recognize and use important logical operations, namely, negation, conjunction, disjunction, and conditional.
- Students will use truth tables to test truth-functional arguments for validity.
- Students will recognize some common valid truth-functional argument forms (e.g., modus ponens, modus tollens, disjunctive syllogism, hypothetical syllogism) and use use them to construct proofs within a system of natural deduction.
- Students will recognize some common truth-functional equivalencies (e.g., double negation, De Morgan's Laws, exportation) and use them to construct proofs proofs within a system of natural deduction.
- Students will recognize some common invalid truth-functional argument forms (e.g., affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent).
- Students will recognize some common informal fallacies (e.g., ad hominem, begging the question, equivocation, and appeals to ignorance).
- Students will evaluate uses of enumerative and analogical induction.
- Students will evaluate arguments that use the strategy of inference to the best explanation.
| SLO 1 COs 1 - 3, 5 - 12 |
SLO 2 COs 1, 2, 4, 6 - 12 |
SLO 3 COs 2, 4 - 12 |
SLO 4 COs 2 - 12 |
SLO 5 COs 9 - 12 |
Course web pages
Syllabus http://www.csun.edu/~hcphi003/PHIL100/syllabus.html Schedule of assignments http://www.csun.edu/~hcphi003/PHIL100/schedule.html Announcements http://www.csun.edu/~hcphi003/PHIL100/announcements.html
| Last modified August 21, 2011. |
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