By taking Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking you will improve your ability to identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments by other people (including politicians, used car salesmen, and teachers) and also to construct arguments of your own in order to convince others and to help you decide what to believe or do. This specialization introduces general standards of good reasoning and offers tools to improve your critical thinking skills. These skills will help you determine when an argument is being given, what its crucial parts are, and what it assumes implicitly. You will also learn how to apply deductive and inductive standards for assessing arguments and how to detect and avoid fallacies.
Great course, I learned a lot from it especially deep analysis, checking arguments and rebuilding, Thank you very much, great presentation from the professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
This course sharpened my analytical thinking. Exam was deceptively difficult but worth taking multiple times.
Fun and educational! A sense of humor goes a long way.
Its been a thoroughly enjoyable and valuable course that's helped shaped my reasons for accepting things people say but also that I say to myself.
This course is very helpful in everyday life, as not everyone pays attention to what everyone else is talking, but those who have taken this course can really understand what they mean.
The course is extremely useful, but I found that the instructor is redundant. I often put the video speed on 1.5x.
if at the end of the course we add a little recap of all the concepts we have covered. it will be much of a help
This course will be immensely helpful in structuring my thoughts in a logical and manner by addressing pertinent material and avoiding fallacy traps. Thank you so much!!!
Thanks a lot, it was awesome journey with coursera. This course teaches how to closely engage with a text, especially those students who pursue their philosophical studies must take this course.
Good course. Unlike the first course of this series, this one is about formal logic. Participants can learn basic of propositional and categorical logics.
This entire series was informative, engaging, and fun, and the thinking skills taught are so valuable.
This is class will be useful for any profession. Please take it!
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I loved this course. The professor is fun and clear and intelligent; the course is complex enough to hold interest and applicable enough to every day life that it will always be useful to each and every person. I personally am a retired person living in "the sticks" of the south of France (Provence) with little access to university learning. I will forever be grateful to Coursera for bringing advanced learning into my living room!!! Thanks to Coursera and to Professor (Doctor) Walter Sinnott-Armstrong...
I do not want to rate this course at this stage but I would like to make the following comment in relation to the course resources and in particular the answers to the exercises in the optional text book.
For students who do not have a copy of the text book, providing answers to questions from the text book without showing the actual questions is not very useful and to be quite frank, ridiculous. I would like to think that the course designers would take some sort of appropriate action to remedy this.
How exactly this would be done is up to the course designers but I would suggest that another downloadable PDF document showing all the questions would be extremely useful and necessary.
I look forward to a response.
Regards, Trevor Farley
Great ideas and excellent material presented, but, they tend to repeat themselves and extend the videos too much, making them tiring, I believe that, making it more to the point, would be appreciated by most of the students.
I found this course very challenging as I find critical thinking very difficult. However this course was extremely rewarding and I will be taking the other three modules in the Think Again series.
I've taken several online courses on logic and argumentation. This one stands out by virtue of the professor's enthusiasm and clarity of explanations. Worth every minute I've spent on it.
Very good course and very humorous professor! Every day we are facing so many propaganda and misleading news from media, if you do not know how to draw valid and sound argument and make good reasoning, it will be easy for you to be misled. Taking this course helps you to distinguish good arguments from the bad ones, therefore, I strongly recommend everyone study this course if you want to be an independent and critical thinker!
This is a very very engaging and applicable course, and is truly presented with 10/10 efficacy! I couldn't be more sincere and adamant in my recommendation, no matter who you are or what you do.
This course was very informative! I would recommend doing the rest of the courses after you've finished this one, because this one is mostly philosophy and grammar of arguments.
The course material and the course itself is great. Very valuable information for someone in any career field. The teachers were nice. I unfortunately ended up having to drop the course a week in.
I was very disappointed that this course turned out not to be for me. The first couple lecture videos the instructor often pulled examples from physics, astronomy or other sciences to better explain the philosophical points he was reviewing. I am an English Literature/History gal myself and had NO IDEA what he was talking about.
It was so frustrating because I was always able to follow along with the instructor at first but every time he went to expand on his thoughts he COMPLETELY lost me and I suddenly had no idea what he was trying to say. After receiving a 33.3% on a quiz because I did not comprehend the definitions of some very easy vocab words I gave up.
Great course, great teachers, just be aware you may get really confused with his lectures if you are not familiar with basic high school/college level science.
I thought this course was about understanding arguments/disputes/how people think etc. NOT linguistics and grammar/syntax
I found this course very challenging as I find critical thinking very difficult. However this course was extremely rewarding and I will be taking the other three modules in the Think Again series.
Excellent course, extremely worthwhile and very challenging for me. I used this course to help with my logic training for LSAT. I will be continuing on to complete all parts of the full course.
Interesting course. It seems to me that we have been learning to play scales before going into music, or learning the names of the letters before learning to read. I wonder how much of all this word by word analysis is useful in real life, real arguing. It is interesting, but it also adds to the difficulty and prompts abandon of the course. Like having to memorize the Periodic Table of Elements before going into the wonders of Chemistry. The Suzuki Method in music or the Silabario Matte (to learn reading in Spanish, starting directly with basic words like "ojo"="eye"), show that starting with structural analysis it isn't the only way to learn things.
Really gets into the semantics here which I wasn't expecting, not quite the course I went in for.
This course has helped me breakdown the structure of arguments and I think it is very useful if you struggle with essay writing as this course helps you understand the fundamentals of arguments.
Explains very simple things in a complicated and repetitive way.
Think again of having this course simplified and delivered to students in their early years of education. Elementary school if possible. Doing so would have a positive effect of the future of humanity in avoiding conflicts as this course have the preliminary information for a critical and healthy mind
This is a very hard course but also very rewarding. It's average Joe's antidote to chaos in a world of fake news.
the final test was a little bit difficult!
Ack! I could not listen to these guys for more than 30 seconds without wanting to throw a cat out of a window. They might have something to say, but I will never hear it.