Critical Thinking

<p>At the end of the course, you'll be able to:</p> <ul><li>Define the characteristics of critical thinking and describe its importance for professional and personal success.</li><li>Describe some of the barriers to good critical thinking, including closed-mindedness and bias.</li><li>Analyze arguments to spot common fallacies, including formal fallacies with logical errors, and informal fallacies that misdirect or include irrelevant information.</li><li>Translate natural language arguments into standard form.</li><li>Evaluate arguments for validity or soundness using non-rigorous techniques.</li><li>Analyze and translate more nuanced and complicated forms of argument in natural language, such as those using rhetorical techniques like assuring, guarding, and discounting, and those with hidden premises.</li><li>Use a more rigorous method for testing arguments for validity.</li><li>Use the process of proofs for showing deductive reasoning based on common rules of inference.</li><li>Use diagrams and reasoning to test or prove categorical statements and relational statements.</li><li>Analyze inductive arguments depending on their purpose, including causal reasoning, explanatory reasoning, analogical reasoning, and statistical generalizations.</li><li>Analyze inductive arguments based on laws of probability, both pure probability such as gambling scenarios and those that apply laws of probability to statistical generalizations.</li><li>Analyze statements for use of hidden premises using evaluative language.</li><li>Engage in moral reasoning based on moral truths and moral duty.</li></ul>