PER4015 - Critical Thinking and Logic

Objectives:

Assessment tasks are designed to enable students to demonstrate the Learning and Employability outcomes for the relevant level of study. Level Learning Outcomes are embedded in the assessment task(s) at that level. This enables a more integrated view of overall student performance at each level.

Content:

This module will introduce students to essential skills in critical thinking and propositional logic. The module will cover (i) central concepts in critical thinking such as validity and soundness, (ii) common fallacies (formal and informal), (iii) the construction of arguments in standard form, (iv) rudimentary propositional logic (including: formalisation of arguments and truth-tables). Students will learn how to identify propositions and their logical relations; how to symbolically express them; and how to assess whether a proposition is contingent. necessary or a contradiction via truth-tables. Following convention, students will learn the differences between conjunctions, disjunctions, conditionals, biconditionals, negations, and the role of scope and brackets. Students will also learn how to evaluate arguments through truth tables and assess whether an argument is valid or invalid. Students will also examine the deeper and more conceptual questions of logic, such as the definition of validity in relation to the principle of explosion, and the role of possible worlds in our conceptualisation of soundness. Students will also be able to identify forms of argumentation, like modus ponens and modus tollens. In covering these topics, this module will equip students with the knowledge and skills necessary for philosophical study in other parts of their programme. It will also help to improve students’ reasoning and argumentation—skills applicable across and beyond their undergraduate studies.

Learning and Teaching Information:

These will include short presentations from the tutor and interactive workshops in which students are encouraged to participate as a means of practising the skills they’re learning as those skills are being taught.

You will be taught using LTU’s multimodal approach to teaching. Your learning will be divided into three stages:

Preparation: You will be given clear tasks to support you in preparing for live, in-person teaching. This may include watching a short, pre-recorded lecture (or other open educational resource), reading a paper or text chapter, finding resources to discuss with your peers in class, reading and commenting on a paper or preparing other material for use in class. Your Module Tutor will give you information to help you understand why you are completing an activity and how this will be built on during live, in-person teaching.

Live: All your live, in-person teaching will be designed around active learning, providing you with valuable opportunities to build on preparation tasks and interact with staff and peers, as well as helping you to deepen your understanding, apply knowledge and surface any misunderstandings.

Post: Follow-up activities will include clear opportunities for you to check understanding and apply your learning to a new situation or context. These activities will also be a source of feedback for staff that will inform subsequent sessions.

Lectures/Seminars
Hours: 24
Intended Group Size: 30

Guided independent study
Hours: 126

Further details relating to assessment
Module Test:
Composed of two parts, students will first be provided with (e.g.,) brief articles and tasked to identify their components such as fallacies, premises and conclusions. Secondly, students will be tasked to demonstrate their ability to perform and not just identify logical operations, critical thinking techniques and argumentation styles. This could be done by requiring students to construct arguments in ordinary English which are specified to include certain features, e.g., ‘write an invalid argument which has a formal fallacy’. Students will also be tasked to formalise arguments in propositional logical form, to complete truth-tables, and to distinguish tautologies, contradictions and contingencies through truth-tables.

The quiz will go live after the final lecture and will close one week later. Students will be permitted to complete the quiz on their own time, with the use of their notes. Once the quiz is started, they will have a total of 120 minutes to complete it, which they may split over different ‘sittings’ over the week allotted.

Assessment:

001 Module test; 1 test; end of semester 1 100%

Fact File

Module Coordinator - David Ellis
Level - 4
Credit Value - 15
Pre-Requisites - NONE
Semester(s) Offered - 4S1

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