Past Categories of Students:

1. 1.Pre-Law: who learn material that helps them do better on the LSAT exam. Some portions of the course relate directly to the LSAT and one exam has LSAT questions.
   

2. 2.English Majors: who are enlarging their understanding of words and prose. Many assignments involve the reading of passages with arguments in them and pulling the argument out and analyzing it.
   

3. 3.Students with space in their schedule who want an opportunity to interact with other bright students.

Major Subjects of Study

1. 1.Language
   The course begins with a look at language and how we define our terms, how we sneak “weasel words” into our arguments to make our opponent look bad, how we intentionally introduce misleading and distracting points to convince others that our argument is stronger than it actually is.
       The central part of this language component is learning how to recognize the traditional logical fallacies that have been studied by students of logic since Artistotle. It turns out that logical fallacies are the foundation of humor, which gives us an excuse to play with “Far Side” cartoons, dissecting the “story” being told in the cartoon.
   
   

2. 2.Deduction
   The second part of the course is deduction, where we learn what kinds of reasoning lead to conclusions with 100% certainty. We study categorical reasoning and how we can draw conclusions by knowing what categories are relevant to something. And we do a little bit of symbolic logic and see how patterns of reasoning can be separated from actual facts about the world. Deduction is a little bit like math, and math-phobic students don’t always enjoy this part of the course.
       One of the interesting conclusions of the study of deduction is that the quest for absolute certainty comes at the expense of saying interesting things. The more rich the claim about the world, the harder it is to use that claim in an argument with a conclusion that has 100% certainty.
   
   

3. 3.“Informal Thinking”
   The final section of the course deals with ordinary “informal” thinking. Analogies and induction receive special emphasis.

NOTE: Logic students can download the required article "Nice Girls Don't Ask" here.

Critical Thinking and Logic is an interdisciplinary course in reasoning, arguing, language and everything else that goes into thinking clearly. I loved the course as an undergraduate, and it is one of my favorite courses to teach. The course is heavily homework-based and most of the class time is spent reviewing homework and solving problems. There is homework every single night that is collected in class. The course can be taken pass/fail for those who are interested but nervous about their grades.

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