1 00:00:03,123 --> 00:00:05,203 Hi. Welcome to our Coursera course. 2 00:00:05,203 --> 00:00:09,853 This is the first time we've ever taught on an online course and we're very 3 00:00:09,853 --> 00:00:11,688 excited about it. All right. 4 00:00:11,688 --> 00:00:15,420 [LAUGH] I'm Walter Sinnett-Armstrong from Duke University. 5 00:00:15,420 --> 00:00:20,254 And my co-teacher is Rob Netta from the University of North Carolina at Chapel 6 00:00:20,254 --> 00:00:21,416 Hill. Say hi, Rob. 7 00:00:21,416 --> 00:00:22,469 Hi. Thanks. 8 00:00:22,469 --> 00:00:26,834 This is going to be a great course. It's going to cover a lot of important 9 00:00:26,834 --> 00:00:30,814 practical issues, raise some fascinating theoretical questions. 10 00:00:30,814 --> 00:00:35,565 We'll also try to have some fun because there are lots of wacky examples where 11 00:00:35,565 --> 00:00:39,416 people make silly mistakes in arguments in everyday life. 12 00:00:39,416 --> 00:00:42,369 And we'll try to teach you how to avoid those. 13 00:00:42,369 --> 00:00:46,414 The title of the course is, Think Again, How to Reason and Argue. 14 00:00:46,414 --> 00:00:50,330 And the title pretty much tells you what the course is about. 15 00:00:50,330 --> 00:00:55,969 We'll try to teach you to think again about a wide range of issues that affect 16 00:00:55,969 --> 00:01:00,378 your life in various ways. We're not going to try and convert you to 17 00:01:00,378 --> 00:01:04,138 our point of view or, or teach you to believe what we believe. 18 00:01:04,138 --> 00:01:09,259 Instead, we want you to think in a new way, and in a deeper way about the issues 19 00:01:09,259 --> 00:01:13,637 that matters to you most. The subtitle of the course, How to Reason 20 00:01:13,637 --> 00:01:18,951 and Argue, tells you that we're going to focus on a particular type of thinking, 21 00:01:18,951 --> 00:01:22,583 namely reasoning. Because most people don't want to be 22 00:01:22,583 --> 00:01:27,829 arbitrary or have unjustified beliefs. They want to have reasons for what they 23 00:01:27,829 --> 00:01:30,520 think and do. But how do you get reasons? 24 00:01:30,520 --> 00:01:36,057 Well, we're going to approach reasons by way of arguments because arguments are 25 00:01:36,057 --> 00:01:40,635 just ways to express reasons. And if you can understand arguments, you 26 00:01:40,635 --> 00:01:44,517 can understand reasons. And if you can formulate good arguments, 27 00:01:44,517 --> 00:01:48,770 you can have good reasons for the ways in which you think and behave. 28 00:01:48,770 --> 00:01:53,366 So, that's one way in which it's important to understand arguments namely, 29 00:01:53,366 --> 00:01:56,830 to get better reasons for your own beliefs and actions. 30 00:01:56,830 --> 00:02:01,028 But another way in which it's very important to understand arguments is to 31 00:02:01,028 --> 00:02:05,394 avoid mistakes because there are lots of charlatans out there who are going to try 32 00:02:05,394 --> 00:02:09,760 to convince you to think the way they want you to think and to behave the way 33 00:02:09,760 --> 00:02:12,670 they want you to behave by giving you bad arguments, 34 00:02:12,670 --> 00:02:17,328 so you need to spot them and avoid them. Just think about a used car salesman who 35 00:02:17,328 --> 00:02:21,642 tries to convince you to buy a car because it looks really cool. 36 00:02:21,642 --> 00:02:25,368 And you'll look even cooler if you're sitting in the car. 37 00:02:25,368 --> 00:02:29,487 Well, that might be a good reason to buy a car and it might not. 38 00:02:29,487 --> 00:02:34,455 And, you're going to have to figure out which kinds of arguments to believe and 39 00:02:34,455 --> 00:02:38,438 which kinds not to believe. Consider another example. 40 00:02:38,438 --> 00:02:41,927 Say, a lawyer in a courtroom and you're sitting in the jury. 41 00:02:41,927 --> 00:02:46,658 And they're going to try to convince you either to find the defendant guilty or to 42 00:02:46,658 --> 00:02:50,502 find the defendant not guilty. But either way, you don't want your 43 00:02:50,502 --> 00:02:54,937 decision to be like flipping a coin. You want to have reasons for what you're 44 00:02:54,937 --> 00:02:59,264 thinking and for the verdict that you reach, as a member of the jury. 45 00:02:59,264 --> 00:03:04,160 Or an Evangelist tries to convert you to their religious beliefs, and to get you 46 00:03:04,160 --> 00:03:08,750 to give up your old religious beliefs. Well, you don't want to make that kind of 47 00:03:08,750 --> 00:03:12,054 decision arbitrarily, either, because it's so important. 48 00:03:12,054 --> 00:03:16,828 And then, what about your personal life? You might have a friend who says, let's 49 00:03:16,828 --> 00:03:19,460 go for a cross country trip, it'll be great. 50 00:03:19,460 --> 00:03:23,102 Well, maybe it will and maybe it won't but you 51 00:03:23,102 --> 00:03:28,136 don't want to commit yourself to such a big endeavor without having thought it 52 00:03:28,136 --> 00:03:31,513 through properly. How are we going to study arguments? 53 00:03:31,513 --> 00:03:34,189 Well, in this course, we'll have four parts. 54 00:03:34,189 --> 00:03:37,694 The first part will teach you how to analyze arguments. 55 00:03:37,694 --> 00:03:42,664 That might seem really simple, you just read the passage and hear what they're 56 00:03:42,664 --> 00:03:45,722 saying. But actually, it's quite hard become some 57 00:03:45,722 --> 00:03:50,692 passages or some sets of words if we're talking about spoken language contain 58 00:03:50,692 --> 00:03:53,560 arguments and others don't. Here's an example. 59 00:03:53,560 --> 00:03:58,852 Consider a letter to the editor. Some letters to the editor don't have 60 00:03:58,852 --> 00:04:03,067 arguments at all. They just say, thank people for having 61 00:04:03,067 --> 00:04:06,670 behaved in nice ways or, or done nice things. 62 00:04:06,670 --> 00:04:11,270 On the other hand, other letters to the editor include arguments. 63 00:04:11,270 --> 00:04:16,949 They try to convince you to vote for a certain political candidate, for example. 64 00:04:16,949 --> 00:04:21,448 So, you need to distinguish which passages include arguments and which 65 00:04:21,448 --> 00:04:25,791 passages don't include arguments. Then, you need to look at those passages 66 00:04:25,791 --> 00:04:30,313 and figure out which of the words, which parts of those passages contain the 67 00:04:30,313 --> 00:04:32,990 argument. Then, you need to separate out those 68 00:04:32,990 --> 00:04:36,857 parts, put them in a certain order, which we'll call standard form. 69 00:04:36,857 --> 00:04:41,379 And, often these arguments will have missing parts and you'll have to supply 70 00:04:41,379 --> 00:04:45,781 those missing parts or suppressed premises in order to get a full picture 71 00:04:45,781 --> 00:04:49,530 of how the argument works. And that's what we'll do in part one. 72 00:04:49,530 --> 00:04:54,026 Then, in part two once we've got the argument in shape, we can start to 73 00:04:54,026 --> 00:04:57,174 evaluate it. But evaluation is going to depend a lot 74 00:04:57,174 --> 00:05:01,958 on what the purpose of the argument is. Some arguments try to be valid in a 75 00:05:01,958 --> 00:05:04,869 logical way, and those are deductive arguments. 76 00:05:04,869 --> 00:05:09,299 So, we'll start first by looking at deductive arguments and the formal 77 00:05:09,299 --> 00:05:13,792 structure of deductive arguments. We'll look at propositional logic and 78 00:05:13,792 --> 00:05:17,082 categorical logic, that'll be part two of the course. 79 00:05:17,082 --> 00:05:21,639 Then, in part three, we'll look at a different kind of argument, inductive 80 00:05:21,639 --> 00:05:24,740 arguments. These don't even try to be deductively 81 00:05:24,740 --> 00:05:27,538 valid. Here, there are just a lot of different 82 00:05:27,538 --> 00:05:32,374 kinds. So, we'll look at statistical generalizations, applying generalizations 83 00:05:32,374 --> 00:05:37,274 down to particular cases, we'll look at inference to the best explanation and 84 00:05:37,274 --> 00:05:40,965 arguments from analogy. We'll look at causal reasoning and 85 00:05:40,965 --> 00:05:45,547 probability and decision making. So, it'll be a lot of different types of 86 00:05:45,547 --> 00:05:48,760 inductive arguments covered in part three. 87 00:05:48,760 --> 00:05:52,469 Then, in part four, we'll look at fallacies. 88 00:05:52,469 --> 00:05:57,367 These are common and very tempting ways to make mistakes in arguments. 89 00:05:57,367 --> 00:06:03,386 Some of them have to do with vagueness, others have to do with ambiguity, some of 90 00:06:03,386 --> 00:06:07,654 them are irrelevance like arguments Ad Hominem and Appeals to Ignorance. 91 00:06:07,654 --> 00:06:13,183 And we'll also look at a major fallacy called begging the question that people 92 00:06:13,183 --> 00:06:17,451 commit all the time. And in the end, we'll teach you a general 93 00:06:17,451 --> 00:06:21,510 method for spotting and avoiding these common mistakes, 94 00:06:21,510 --> 00:06:25,766 so that'll be part four. And at the end of each part, we'll have a 95 00:06:25,766 --> 00:06:29,663 short quiz with some questions to make sure you understood. 96 00:06:29,663 --> 00:06:34,502 So, we're very glad to have you in this course and we're very honored to that 97 00:06:34,502 --> 00:06:37,141 there are so many students in this course. 98 00:06:37,141 --> 00:06:41,729 But that raises one problem, namely, we cannot answer emails from students. 99 00:06:41,729 --> 00:06:46,595 So, please do not email us individually. There will be discussion forums where you 100 00:06:46,595 --> 00:06:50,270 can go and talk to other students about the material in the course. 101 00:06:50,270 --> 00:06:53,945 And, I bet that if you go to the those forums, not only will you get your 102 00:06:53,945 --> 00:06:57,127 questions answered. But if you go to those forums and help 103 00:06:57,127 --> 00:07:01,350 answer other peoples questions, everybody will learn more and that's what this 104 00:07:01,350 --> 00:07:04,532 course is all about. So, thanks very much for joining us on 105 00:07:04,532 --> 00:07:09,029 this adventure and we hope you stick with it because we've got a lot of fun and a 106 00:07:09,029 --> 00:07:13,240 lot of important things to cover. One final recommendation. 107 00:07:13,240 --> 00:07:18,043 We've done these lectures so that you can just watch the lectures by themselves, 108 00:07:18,043 --> 00:07:20,565 and do the exercises and take the quizzes. 109 00:07:20,565 --> 00:07:24,829 However, if you're listening to a lecture and you have a little trouble 110 00:07:24,829 --> 00:07:28,135 understanding it, or if you're really fascinated and you 111 00:07:28,135 --> 00:07:32,238 want to get more detail, then there is an accompanying textbook called 112 00:07:32,238 --> 00:07:35,521 Understanding Arguments by myself and Robert Fogelin. 113 00:07:35,521 --> 00:07:39,155 Many, many, many of the best ideas in this course come from him. 114 00:07:39,155 --> 00:07:43,668 He's been a leader in this field of understanding arguments for many decades 115 00:07:43,668 --> 00:07:47,127 and I owe an awful lot to him and I really appreciate that. 116 00:07:47,127 --> 00:07:51,757 So, I wanted to do a little shout out of thanks to Robert Fogelin before we get 117 00:07:51,757 --> 00:07:54,278 started on this course in the next lecture.