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Career English: Task-based
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Reasoning is important. This course is an introduction on how to reason well. You will learn how to understand and assess arguments by other people and how to construct good arguments of your own about whatever matters to you. We will discuss how to identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments by other people (including politicians, used car salesmen, and teachers) and how to construct arguments of your own in order to help you decide what to believe or what to do.
The online component to this course (Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects) gives you easy access to invaluable learning techniques used by experts in art, music, literature, math, science, sports, and many other disciplines. We will learn about how the brain uses two very different learning modes and how it encapsulates information. We will also cover illusions of learning, memory techniques, dealing with procrastination, and best practices shown by research to be most effective in helping you master tough subjects.
This 4-week online Coursera class is meant to give you practical insight on how to learn more deeply and with less frustration. The lessons will help you in learning many different subjects and skills.
Week 2 Introduction: Focused versus Diffuse Thinking
Week 4 Chunking
Week 6 Procrastination and Memory
Week 8 Renaissance Learning and Unlocking Your Potential
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Week 1: How to Spot an Argument
CONTENT: This week’s lectures will define what an argument is, distinguish various purposes for which arguments are given (including persuasion, justification, and explanation), and discuss the material out of which arguments are made (language). The last three lectures are optional honors lectures. READING: Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, Chapters 1-2
Week 2: How to Untangle an Argument
CONTENT: This week’s lectures will focus on the special language in which arguments are formulated. We will investigate the functions of particular words, including premise and conclusion markers plus assuring, guarding, discounting, and evaluative terms. Identifying these words will enable students to separate arguments from the irrelevant verbiage that surrounds it and then to break the argument into parts and to identify what each part of an argument is doing. The lectures end with a detailed example that uses these tools to closely analyze an op-ed from a newspaper. READING: Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, Chapters 3-4
Week 3: How to Reconstruct an Argument
CONTENT: This week’s lectures will teach students how to organize the parts of an argument in order to show how they fit into a structure of reasoning. We work through the main steps of reconstruction, including putting the premises and conclusion into a standard form, clarifying the premises and breaking them into parts, arranging the argument into stages or sub-arguments, adding suppressed premises where needed to make the argument valid, and assessing the argument for soundness. The lectures begin by defining the crucial notions of validity, soundness, and standard form. Students also learn to diagram alternative argument structures, including linear, branching, and joint structures. READING: Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, Chapter 5
QUIZ #1: At the end of Week 3, students will take their first quiz.
Week 4: Propositional Logic and Truth Tables
CONTENT: This week’s lectures will present propositional logic, which formalizes external relations between whole propositions or sentences in deductive arguments. Topics include negation (“not”), conjunction (“and”), disjunction (“or”), and conditionals (“if…, then …”). Students will learn to test arguments for validity using truth tables. READING: Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, Chapter 6
Week 5: Categorical Logic and Syllogisms
CONTENT: This week’s lectures will present categorical logic, which formalizes some deductive relations that depend on internal features of propositions or sentences in deductive arguments. Topics include the four basic categorical forms, contradictory and contrary propositions, existential commitment, immediate inferences, and syllogisms. Students will learn to test arguments for validity using Venn diagrams. READING: Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, Chapter 7
Week 6: Representing Information
CONTENT: This week’s lectures will discuss the different ways to represent information, and how different ways of representing information can be useful in helping us to understand why some deductive arguments are valid and other are invalid, even if we don't fully understand those arguments. Topics include a review of truth-tables, Venn diagrams, and the point of using these tools to represent information that can also be represented in sentences.
QUIZ #2: At the end of Week 6, students will take their second quiz.
Week 7: Inductive Arguments
CONTENT: This week’s lectures will distinguish inductive arguments from deductive arguments and then discuss four common forms of inductive argument: generalizations from samples (such as in political polls), applications of generalizations to particular cases (such as in predicting weather on a certain day), inferences to the best explanation (such as in using evidence to determine who committed a crime), and arguments from analogy (such as in identifying the use of one archaeological artifact by comparing it to other artifacts). We will expose the most common mistakes in these kinds of reasoning. READING:Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, Chapters 8 and 9
Week 8: Causal Reasoning
CONTENT: This week’s lectures will focus on how to decide what causes what. Students will learn how to distinguish necessary conditions from sufficient conditions and how to use data to determine what is and what is not a necessary condition or a sufficient condition. Then we will distinguish causation from correlation (or concomitant variation) and explain the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. READING: Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, Chapter 10
Week 9: Chance and Choice
CONTENT: This week’s lectures will cover chance and choice. Students will learn about the nature and kinds of probability and four simple rules for calculating probabilities. An optional honors lecture will explain Bayes’ theorem. Next we will use probabilities to evaluate decisions by figuring their expected financial value and contrasting financial value with overall value. READING: Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, Chapters 11 and 12
QUIZ #3: At the end of Week 9, students will take their third quiz.
Week 10: Fallacies of Unclarity
CONTENT: This week’s lectures will define fallacies as common but tempting mistakes in argument. Then we will explore two very common kinds of fallacies that depend on unclarity in language — specifically, slippery slope arguments that depend on vagueness and equivocations that exploit ambiguity. The lectures will close by distinguishing several kinds of definitions that can help to avoid or respond to fallacies of unclarity. READING: Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, Chapters 13 and 14
Week 11: Fallacies of Relevance and of Vacuity
CONTENT: This week’s lectures will look at fallacies in which the premises are irrelevant to the conclusion, or in which the premises cannot be reasonably accepted before we have reasonably accepted the conclusion. The first group includes arguments ad hominem and fallacious appeals to authority, to emotion, and to ignorance. The second includes begging the question, but we will also discuss various ways in which people seal their positions to make them immune to any possible counterexample. This apparent virtue turns out to be a vice. READING: Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, Chapters 15 and 16
Week 12: Refutation
CONTENT: Not all objections to arguments succeed in refuting those arguments, so this week’s lectures begin by distinguishing objections from refutations. One way to refute an argument is to show that its premises are false, so we will discuss counterexamples and reductio ad absurdum arguments. Another way to refute an argument is to show that its premises do not support its conclusion, which can be accomplished by a method called refutation by parallel reasoning (or “That’s just like arguing …”). The method is a general way to spot fallacies. This closing week brings us back to a theme of the first week, because refutation is another purpose of argument in addition to persuasion, justification, and explanation. READING:Understanding Arguments, Ninth Edition, Chapter 17
QUIZ #4: At the end of Week 12, students will take their fourth quiz.
Week 13: TBA
Week 14: Active learning 1
Week 15: Active learning 2
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Grades in this course will be based on a total number of points earned. Grades will be based on the performance of presentations (20% each) and participation in class discussions (10%). The midterm and final presentations will be in the form of group presentations. The online classes will count for 50% of your grade (25% each).
Full attendance of classes is highly encouraged, but attendance will not be counted as part of your grade. However, if you are late to class often or you miss too many classes, you will be unable to participate fully in the class, and thus, you will lose points in your participation grade. Part of your participation also includes speaking in English. Excessive use of Japanese during class time will reduce your participation score.
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