PHILOSOPHY 1900: LOGICAL AND CRITICAL REASONING
Brian Beakley
3536 Coleman Hall  581-3964
Office Hours: T, Th 1-2; 5-6; 7:15-7:45
bbeakley@eiu.edu

This course will offer a survey of forms of human reasoning, in order to sharpen your awareness of what does and what does not constitute good reasoning, or rationality.  Since the aim of philosophy is to examine how reasonable different worldviews are, the skills studied in this class constitute the fundamental tools for philosophical inquiry, whether in a class or in life.  But even if you are not particularly interested in philosophical issues, you should be concerned to separate good arguments from bad, as the ability to do so is crucial to survival in any area of life.  The point of the course is thus not so much to make you a philosopher, as to make you a bit more reflective and critical of everyday arguments.

Through a series of stages, we will attempt to develop a systematic language for describing argument structure.  In particular, we will spend most of the semester considering the central notion of VALIDITY, and developing full-proof tests for detecting validity in arguments.  (1) We will first look at the most basic components of inference in an informal context, examining a lot of everyday arguments and trying to work out concepts and techniques for classifying their internal structure, as well as for separating the good from the bad.  (2) From there we will try to separate the form of arguments from the content,  introduce a language -- the propositional calculus -- which describes the logical form of various basic types of inferences.  (3) Having developed this first formal language, and employed it in testing for validity, we will go on to develop some methods for formally describing the way people use arguments (and language in general) in concrete situations -- examining the shared  assumptions and background knowledge necessary for communication, general rules for conversation, and so on.

While all this may look intimidating in the abstract, I think the subjects will prove quite intuitive and familiar  -- after all, we will mostly be systematizing patterns of reasoning implicit in your ordinary ways of thinking.

The grading will be based on a midterm exam (36 points), a final exam (36 points), six unannounced quizzes (6 points each: 6 x 6 = 36 points), and six homeworks (2 points each: 6 x 2 = 12), for a total of 120 points.

In order to make the unannounced-quiz and -homework policy worthwhile, missed quizzes and homeworks (and exams too, for that matter) can only be made up in cases of documented excusable absences (illness, death, marriage, job interview, away game, etc.).  However: you get one free makeup for a quiz, and one for a homework; that is, one makeup (for each) that requires no excuse or documentation.  (Of course, if you have documentation of an excused absence, you will probably not want to spend your forgiveness on that occasion.)  This is not a chance to re-take a quiz or homework that you did poorly on, nor is it a chance to ‘drop the lowest grade,’ or anything of that sort; it only applies to an assignment that you missed.  There are no free makeups in the last week of class, and in finals week.