PHIL102

The student will be able to:

Discriminate between passages which contain arguments and those which do not by locating premise and conclusion indicators,

Diagnose some recurrent fallacies and eradicate common psychological obstacles to critical thinking,

Define basic logical concepts such as truth, logical possibility, consistency, validity, soundness, necessary and sufficient conditions, counterexamples, etc.,

Distinguish good from bad reasons for doubt and belief by assessing the quality of evidence for hypothesis,

Distinguish deductive from inductive arguments, and identify some common deductive valid and invalid argument forms,

Classify different kinds of inductive argument, including enumerative arguments, arguments by analogy, inferences to the best explanation, and causal arguments; and document their use in various fields of study,

Utilize some basic methods to test simple deductive arguments for validity and construct short proofs in a system of symbolic logic (either propositional or categorical).