Logic and Critical Thinking

This course provides an introduction to critical thinking, informal logic, and a small amount of formal logic.

Its purpose is to provide you with the basic tools of analytical reasoning, which will give you a distinctive edge in a wide variety of careers and courses of study. While many university courses focus on the presentation of content knowledge, the emphasis here is on learning how to think effectively. Although the techniques and concepts covered here are classified as philosophical, they are essential to the practice of nearly every major discipline, from the physical sciences and medicine to politics, law, and the humanities. The course touches upon a wide range of reasoning skills, from verbal argument analysis to formal logic, visual and statistical reasoning, scientific methodology, and creative thinking. Mastering these skills will help you become a more perceptive reader and listener, a more persuasive writer and presenter, and a more effective researcher and scientist. The first unit introduces the terrain of critical thinking and covers the basics of meaning analysis, while the second unit provides a primer in analyzing arguments. All of the material in these first units will be built upon in subsequent units, which cover informal and formal logic, Venn diagrams, scientific reasoning, as well as strategic and creative thinking.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

describe what critical thinking is, and explain why it is valuable;
assess the credibility and reliability of sources;
distinguish between good and bad definitions, recognize the differences between explicit and implicit meaning, and remove ambiguities of meaning from unclearly worded statements;
recognize arguments in writing, evaluate good and bad arguments, and construct sound arguments of your own;
diagnose the most common reasoning errors and fallacies as well as identify ways of improving them;
describe and apply the basics of sentential and categorical logic;
describe and apply the rudiments of scientific methodology and reasoning;
analyze and evaluate arguments using visualization tools; and
describe and apply the basics of strategic reasoning and problem-solving.

Primary Resources: This course comprises a range of different free, online materials. A major resource for the course is the University of Hong Kong’s Critical Thinking Web (HTML), created by Joe Lau and Jonathan Chan.

Course Designer: Professor Nicholaos Jones