PHI115: & Course Handbook

Lecturer: Andrew Howat (a.howat@sheffield.ac.uk)

Office Hours: Mondays 1-2, Thursdays 2-3

Timetable: Lecture: Friday 11 – 12, CH-LT6 (in the Dainton Building) Tutorials: sign-up for tutorials in Philosophy Department (beside lifts, Arts Tower, 12th Floor) on 10th October.

Assignment Deadline: Tuesday, 4th December (Week 10)

Course Outline & Objectives:

Arguments are everywhere - in our newspapers, on our television screens and radios, in books and academic papers, on blogs and other websites. We argue with our friends, families, teachers and taxi drivers. These are often important – they help us to decide what to do, what to believe, whom to vote for, what car to buy, what career path to follow, or where we should attend university (and what we should study). The ability to recognise, evaluate and produce arguments is therefore immeasurably valuable in every aspect of life. This course will teach you how to recognise an argument, how to understand it, how to evaluate and criticise it, and how to produce your own. Students in this module will learn how to extract an argument from a complex text, how to uncover hidden assumptions, and how to recognise and criticise bad reasoning.

1 Course Books & other Resources

Mandatory Course Text:

McKay, Thomas (2000) , Explanations and Decisions: Guidelines for , Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.

Alternative Texts for Keen Students:

Shand, John 2000: Arguing Well. London: Routledge. Thomson, Anne 2002: Critical Reasoning: A Practical Introduction. London: Routledge. Warburton, Nigel 2000: Thinking A to Z. London: Routledge.

Some web resources:

http://mcckc.edu/longview/ctac/toc.htm A directory of helpful material on some of the central concepts in Critical Thinking, as well as links to external sites with similar material.

http://www.criticalthinking.org Click ‘Library/Articles’, then select ‘For Students’, to find various helpful articles on Critical Thinking strategies.

http://cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/epb/aa.html A free online book on how to analyse arguments.

Attendance Attendance at lectures and seminars is mandatory. Tutors will report students who do not attend tutorials to the University for unsatisfactory progress; such students risk failing the module.

Assessment I will assess students based on one coursework assignment (50%) and one exam (50%). You will receive more information about the assignment and the exam later in the course.

Late-Submission Penalties The new university-wide policy is that essays submitted late will be docked 5% for each working day after the deadline, unless the student has been granted an extension by the Director of First-Year Studies (Rosanna Keefe: [email protected]). Details are in the first- year handbook.

2 Plagiarism It is plagiarism to present the written work of someone else, whether an author, a lecturer, or another student, as your own. (You are, however, encouraged to discuss your work with your lecturer and fellow students.) All passages taken from other people’s work, either word for word or with small changes, must be placed within quotation marks, with specific reference to author, title and page. No excuse can be accepted for any failure to do so, nor will inclusion of the source in a bibliography be considered an adequate acknowledgment.

The minimum penalty for plagiarism is ordinarily a mark of zero for the essay. Serious cases and repeat offences will be referred to the University Disciplinary Committee, which has the power to expel students from the University. Students in the past have lost their degrees because of plagiarism. Any case of plagiarism will be recorded in the student’s permanent record.

The University subscribes to an electronic plagiarism detection service, which can check any piece of work against a vast database of web pages, essays available for purchase over the internet, and previously submitted student essays. This makes it fairly easy to detect plagiarism, as well as providing hard evidence to back up the claim that a student has cheated. It has resulted in numerous convictions in the past. So do not be tempted!

If you are in any doubt about what counts as fair and unfair use of other people's work, ask your tutor or lecturer for advice.

3 Overview of Course Topics Please note that the numbers below correspond to topics rather than weeks, and that this list is a guideline only - it may take more or less time to cover any given topic, leading to changes in the content of the course . I estimate it will take around 10 weeks of lectures to cover these topics. In the remaining two weeks, we will be holding workshop sessions (more about these below).

1. What is Critical Thinking? a. Arguments i. Premises ii. Conclusions b. How to Recognise an Argument i. Premise indicators ii. Unstated Premises iii. Conclusion indicators 2. Evaluating Arguments a. Validity i. Valid Argument forms ii. Invalid argument forms iii. Induction vs. Deduction b. Soundness 3. Subtleties of Language a. Meaning & Reference b. Indexicals c. Predicates d. i. Contextual ii. Lexical iii. Syntactic e. f. Conflation g. and 4. Informal I a. False b. c. Causal d. Conceptual Slippery Slope e. 5. Informal Fallacies II a. Circularity b. Appeals to Authority c. Pathos (arguments from pity) d. Arguments from Ignorance e. Beside-the-point-ness 6. Applying CT Skills in Life & Work a. Reading skills: i. Finding and Selecting Sources ii. Skimming, Highlighting, and Annotating

4 iii. Paraphrasing, Summarising, Referencing, and Quotations iv. Thesis, Purpose, Method, and Persona b. Writing skills: i. Planning (and the rule of three) ii. Drafting (inc. paragraphing) iii. Revising (inc. referencing) c. Constructing Arguments: i. Summary of CT techniques covered in course.

Tutorials Registration for tutorials is on the 10th of October in the department of philosophy (Arts Tower, 12th floor). It is vital that you attend all the tutorials, especially given there are only four of them! Critical Thinking is a skill, not merely a collection of facts. Unless you practice this skill in tutorials with your fellow students (and preferably at home too), you will find it very difficult to succeed in this course.

Tutorial preparation will in be in the form of exercises from McKay. These will be discussed in your tutorial. Tutorials will generally function as sort of problem-solving workshops. In addition to the material you have prepared, your tutor may also either (1) discuss exercises from McKay other than those you have prepared, or (2) discuss material not from McKay, but appropriate to the topic for the week. Always ask your tutor for help if you are puzzled by anything in McKay or the lectures.

Please note: your tutor may assign alternative exercises. Be sure to do whatever exercises your tutor assigns.

Tutorial 1 (Week 3) This tutorial will cover material from Chapter 1 of McKay. Before the tutorial, prepare Exercise 1B on page 6, 1C on page 9 and Exercise 1E on page 17.

Tutorial 2 (Week 5) This tutorial will cover material from Chapter 2 of McKay. Before the tutorial, prepare Exercise 2A on pages 23-24, Exercises 2B & 2C on page 28, and Exercise 2E on pp. 36-7.

Tutorial 3 (Week 8) This tutorial will cover material from Chapter 3 of McKay. Before the tutorial, prepare Exercise 3A on page 63, Exercise 3B on pp. 64-5 and Exercise 3C on p. 75.

Tutorial 4 (Week 10) This tutorial will cover material from Chapter 4 of McKay. Before the tutorial, prepare Exercise 4B on p. 87 and Exercise 4C on p. 90, Exercise 4D on p. 91 and Exercise 4E on p. 97.

5 Workshop Sessions This year the department is piloting a scheme to introduce a more vocational or real- world element into its critical thinking curriculum. Under this scheme, the last two sessions of Reason & Argument will be extended slightly (to 90 mins or so) and will involve visits by guest speakers. These speakers will represent employers from various sectors, such as the civil service, law, journalism and so on. The speakers will be invited to describe, discuss and illustrate to you the important role that critical thinking skills - like those you will learn in this course - play in different areas of life and work. After each workshop, a select group of interested students will be invited to a special dinner with the guest speakers. I will provide more information about this unique opportunity nearer the time.

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