Course Description

Critical thinking essentially distinguishes between the capacity and quality of human thought. That is, it essentially denies that thought is merely the ability to process information and to make judgments with respect to it. Rather, critical thinking attests that there are certain modes of thinking that we can cultivate
to clearly and carefully understand, evaluate, and communicate information. This course introduces students to such modes of thought. In order to facilitate such an introduction the course will be guided by four intellectual virtues that critical thinking fundamentally involves:
1) humility (the ability to admit limitations, ignorance, or confusion, etc.),
2) carefulness (the ability to identify and avoid mistakes and errors in reasoning),
3) thoroughness (the ability to think clearly and distinctly, providing sufficient justification for claims), and
4) open-mindedness (the ability judge fairly, empathetically, and with sensitivity to alternative beliefs).
Within these guidelines course topics will include the nature, limitations and justifications of knowledge, cognitive errors, formal and informal fallacies of reasoning, the structure of arguments, deductive and inductive reasoning, basic propositional and categorical logic, and sociocultural criticism.