PHIL 206--REASONING AND CRITICAL THINKING
INSTRUCTOR: James A. Keller
OFFICE: Daniel 217
PHONE: 4594
E-MAIL: kellerja@wofford.edu.
I check e-mail regularly, so this gives you another way to contact me.
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This is a course designed to improve your ability to reason and to think critically about the information which comes to you and the decisions that you have to make. Its focus is the skills involved in identifying, analyzing, and evaluating arguments. Thus, it is a course that aims primarily at improving your skills rather than conveying new information to you. But since some of the latter is required for the former, the course will also include the latter aim. The ability to reason and to think critically is a skill that should be useful to you in other areas of your education, in your career, and in making everyday decisions. How useful it is to you will depend to a very great extent on how well you develop and use this skill. Class sessions will begin with brief lectures to clarify and/or amplify certain points in the text, but most of the time will be spent discussing the exercises in the text. We will also spend part of several class sessions in small-group work in which students offer constructive criticisms of each other's arguments.
PREREQUISITES: None. This course is a beginning-level course in philosophy and counts toward the general education requirement in philosophy.
TEXT: Critical Reasoning by Jerry Cederblom and David Paulsen; 5th ed. (Wadsworth Press).
GRADING: Tests 40% (20% for each of two tests)
Final Exam 35%
Argument and Paper 10%
Class Participation and Homework 15%
COURSE OUTLINE AND COURSE GOALS AND OBJECTIVES:
Since this is a skills course, the outline of the course correlates closely with the skills that you are
expected to acquire in the course.
Chapters 1-3
1. Identifying arguments, their premises and conclusions.
2. Supplying missing premises and conclusions
3. Expressing arguments in standard form
The first test will cover these topics. Success on it requires that you have acquired the ability to
do the foregoing things on passages of low to moderate difficulty.
Chapters 4-7
4. Determining whether deductive arguments are valid or not, and learning some common patterns of valid arguments.
6. Identifying some common informal fallacies in passages
7. Clarifying the meaning of unclear statements and evaluating premises
The second test will cover these topics. Success on it requires that you have acquired the ability
to do the foregoing things on passages of low to moderate difficulty.
Chapters 8-11
8. Identifying, putting in standard form, and evaluating four types of inductive arguments: empirical generalizations, causal arguments, arguments with statistical premises, and arguments from analogy.
9. Identifying, putting in standard form, and evaluating theories.
10. Putting it all together: using all the techniques you have learned to evaluate more complex passages.
11. The role of these skills in everyday life.
While we are covering these topics from the book, there will also be a small-group exercise in
which you write arguments, critique the arguments of other students in your group, and then write
a short (1-2 page) position paper on your selected topic, using the arguments of all the students in
your group. More information about this assignment will be distributed later in the semester. Its
purpose is to enhance your skills at writing arguments, evaluating them, and using the results of
that evaluation to come to conclusions on a topic. The work you do on these arguments and
papers will not be included on the final exam.
There will not be a separate third test on the topics in Chapters 8-11. These topics will be covered on the final exam, which will be comprehensive. However, about half of the exam will be devoted to topics in Chapters 8-11 and the remainder of the exam to topics in previous chapters.
CLASS ATTENDANCE: I will take attendance at every class. I would like you to attend regularly because I believe that the discussion of the Exercises is very important; it will occupy much of the class time (see the Assignment Sheet). Moreover, some of the class sessions will include breaking up into small groups for discussion of certain items; obviously there is no way to obtain the benefits of this group discussion without being there. Therefore, class participation is a factor in your overall grade. Furthermore, I see little reason for anyone to stay in a course if he or she is not doing satisfactory work and is not making an effort. So if you are doing less than C work and you are frequently absent, I will institute procedures to drop you from the course. (I regard more than three unexcused absences as frequent.)
POLICY ON TESTS AND PAPERS: You are expected to take all the tests and to turn in all the written work at the assigned times. The only legitimate reasons not to do so are circumstances beyond your control. Failure to be ready does not constitute a legitimate excuse unless there is some reason (such as illness) beyond your control that kept you from being ready. If you anticipate problems in taking a test or in turning in written work at the assigned times, I urge you to see me as far in advance as possible. If you have not spoken to me in advance and you miss a test or written assignment, you may have to obtain validation of your excuse through the Office of the Dean of Students.
TESTS: Each test will cover the material indicated in the syllabus for that test. The final exam will be comprehensive, though it will be weighted more heavily toward the material after the second test.
PAPER: There will be one very short paper (no more than two pages) due near the end of the semester. It will be based on some short arguments that you will construct and criticize prior to writing the paper. More details will be given out in advance of the start of the process.
WORK ON THE COMPUTER: Part of your work in this course will be done in a conference on Wofford's VAX computer. By noon on September 22 you must add Phil201A or Phil206B (whichever you are in) to your notebook of conferences on the VAX; then to make sure that you can access that notebook, you must open that notebook, read note 1, and enter a REPLY to note 1 in which you say that you read it. The instructions for doing this are on a separate handout. Your reply must come from your own Wofford account, so if you do not have a Wofford account you will have to get one. You can request one at the help desk in the computer lab, but it takes a couple days, so allow time for it if you do not already have an account. Remember you must have entered the reply by noon on September 22. Directions for doing other things on a notes conference are also given on the separate handout.
CLASS PARTICIPATION AND HOMEWORK GRADE: One component of your final grade will be determined by your class participation and your work on assigned homework. Homework will account for about 15% of this component and class participation the balance. I will assign a grade to you each day based on the quality of your participation that day. Obtaining a high overall grade for class participation requires that you make regular contributions to class discussion that show that you have done the work assigned for that class period. I will calculate your overall participation grade by averaging your daily participation grade after I have dropped the four lowest daily grades. Any day you are absent, you will be given a 0 regardless of the reason. The four grades I will drop are intended to cover excused and unexcused absences. If you have an extended illness or encounter some other unanticipated circumstance beyond your control that causes you to have many excused absences, talk with me about it and I will try to work out some fair accommodation. However, if you now anticipate having many absences please come see me.