By taking Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking you will improve your ability to identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments by other people (including politicians, used car salesmen, and teachers) and also to construct arguments of your own in order to convince others and to help you decide what to believe or do. This specialization introduces general standards of good reasoning and offers tools to improve your critical thinking skills. These skills will help you determine when an argument is being given, what its crucial parts are, and what it assumes implicitly. You will also learn how to apply deductive and inductive standards for assessing arguments and how to detect and avoid fallacies.

In this course, you will learn what an argument is. The definition of argument will enable you to identify when speakers are giving arguments and when they are not. Next, you will learn how to break an argument into its essential parts, how to put them in order to reveal their connections, and how to fill in gaps in an argument by adding suppressed premises. By the end of this course, you will be better able to understand and appreciate arguments that you and other people present.


Suggested Readings:
Students who want more detailed explanations or additional exercises or who want to explore these topics in more depth should consult Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic, Ninth Edition, Concise, Chapters 1-5, by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin.

Course Format:
Each week will be divided into multiple video segments that can be viewed separately or in groups. There will be short ungraded quizzes after each segment (to check comprehension) and a longer graded quiz at the end of the course.

Think Again I: How to Understand Arguments

Deductive arguments are supposed to be valid in the sense that the premises guarantee that the conclusion is true. In this course, you will learn how to use truth-tables and Venn diagrams to represent the information contained in the premises and conclusion of an argument so that you can determine whether or not the argument is deductively valid.  


Suggested Readings:
Students who want more detailed explanations or additional exercises or who want to explore these topics in more depth should consult Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic, Ninth Edition, Concise, Chapters 6 and 7 by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin.

Course Format:
Each week will be divided into multiple video segments that can be viewed separately or in groups. There will be short ungraded quizzes after each segment (to check comprehension) and a longer graded quiz at the end of the course.

Think Again II: How to Reason Deductively

Want to solve a murder mystery? What caused your computer to fail? Who can you trust in your everyday life? In this course, you will learn how to analyze and assess five common forms of inductive arguments: generalizations from samples, applications of generalizations, inference to the best explanation, arguments from analogy, and causal reasoning. The course closes by showing how you can use probability to help make decisions of all sorts.


Suggested Readings
Students who want more detailed explanations or additional exercises or who want to explore these topics in more depth should consult Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic, Ninth Edition, Concise, Chapters 8-12, by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin.

Course Format
Each week will be divided into multiple video segments that can be viewed separately or in groups. There will be short ungraded quizzes after each segment (to check comprehension) and a longer graded quiz at the end of the course.

Think Again III: How to Reason Inductively

We encounter fallacies almost everywhere we look. Politicians, salespeople, and children commonly use fallacies in order to get you to think whatever they want you to think. It’s important to learn to recognize fallacies so that you can avoid being fooled by them. It’s also important to learn about fallacies so that you avoid making fallacious arguments yourself. This course will show you how to identify and avoid many of the fallacies that lead people astray.

In this course, you will learn about fallacies. Fallacies are arguments that suffer from one or more common but avoidable defects:  equivocation, circularity, vagueness, etc. It’s important to learn about fallacies so that you can recognize them when you see them, and not be fooled by them. It’s also important to learn about fallacies so that you avoid making fallacious arguments yourself.

Suggested Readings
Students who want more detailed explanations or additional exercises or who want to explore these topics in more depth should consult Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic, Ninth Edition, Concise, Chapters 13-17, by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin.

Course Format
Each week will be divided into multiple video segments that can be viewed separately or in groups. There will be short ungraded quizzes after each segment (to check comprehension) and a longer graded quiz at the end of the course.

Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking

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