Hi. Welcome to our Coursera course.
This is the first time we've ever taught on an online course and we're very
excited about it. All right.
[LAUGH] I'm Walter Sinnett-Armstrong from Duke University.
And my co-teacher is Rob Netta from the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. Say hi, Rob.
Hi. Thanks.
This is going to be a great course. It's going to cover a lot of important
practical issues, raise some fascinating theoretical questions.
We'll also try to have some fun because there are lots of wacky examples where
people make silly mistakes in arguments in everyday life.
And we'll try to teach you how to avoid those.
The title of the course is, Think Again, How to Reason and Argue.
And the title pretty much tells you what the course is about.
We'll try to teach you to think again about a wide range of issues that affect
your life in various ways. We're not going to try and convert you to
our point of view or, or teach you to believe what we believe.
Instead, we want you to think in a new way, and in a deeper way about the issues
that matters to you most. The subtitle of the course, How to Reason
and Argue, tells you that we're going to focus on a particular type of thinking,
namely reasoning. Because most people don't want to be
arbitrary or have unjustified beliefs. They want to have reasons for what they
think and do. But how do you get reasons?
Well, we're going to approach reasons by way of arguments because arguments are
just ways to express reasons. And if you can understand arguments, you
can understand reasons. And if you can formulate good arguments,
you can have good reasons for the ways in which you think and behave.
So, that's one way in which it's important to understand arguments namely,
to get better reasons for your own beliefs and actions.
But another way in which it's very important to understand arguments is to
avoid mistakes because there are lots of charlatans out there who are going to try
to convince you to think the way they want you to think and to behave the way
they want you to behave by giving you bad arguments,
so you need to spot them and avoid them. Just think about a used car salesman who
tries to convince you to buy a car because it looks really cool.
And you'll look even cooler if you're sitting in the car.
Well, that might be a good reason to buy a car and it might not.
And, you're going to have to figure out which kinds of arguments to believe and
which kinds not to believe. Consider another example.
Say, a lawyer in a courtroom and you're sitting in the jury.
And they're going to try to convince you either to find the defendant guilty or to
find the defendant not guilty. But either way, you don't want your
decision to be like flipping a coin. You want to have reasons for what you're
thinking and for the verdict that you reach, as a member of the jury.
Or an Evangelist tries to convert you to their religious beliefs, and to get you
to give up your old religious beliefs. Well, you don't want to make that kind of
decision arbitrarily, either, because it's so important.
And then, what about your personal life? You might have a friend who says, let's
go for a cross country trip, it'll be great.
Well, maybe it will and maybe it won't but you
don't want to commit yourself to such a big endeavor without having thought it
through properly. How are we going to study arguments?
Well, in this course, we'll have four parts.
The first part will teach you how to analyze arguments.
That might seem really simple, you just read the passage and hear what they're
saying. But actually, it's quite hard become some
passages or some sets of words if we're talking about spoken language contain
arguments and others don't. Here's an example.
Consider a letter to the editor. Some letters to the editor don't have
arguments at all. They just say, thank people for having
behaved in nice ways or, or done nice things.
On the other hand, other letters to the editor include arguments.
They try to convince you to vote for a certain political candidate, for example.
So, you need to distinguish which passages include arguments and which
passages don't include arguments. Then, you need to look at those passages
and figure out which of the words, which parts of those passages contain the
argument. Then, you need to separate out those
parts, put them in a certain order, which we'll call standard form.
And, often these arguments will have missing parts and you'll have to supply
those missing parts or suppressed premises in order to get a full picture
of how the argument works. And that's what we'll do in part one.
Then, in part two once we've got the argument in shape, we can start to
evaluate it. But evaluation is going to depend a lot
on what the purpose of the argument is. Some arguments try to be valid in a
logical way, and those are deductive arguments.
So, we'll start first by looking at deductive arguments and the formal
structure of deductive arguments. We'll look at propositional logic and
categorical logic, that'll be part two of the course.
Then, in part three, we'll look at a different kind of argument, inductive
arguments. These don't even try to be deductively
valid. Here, there are just a lot of different
kinds. So, we'll look at statistical generalizations, applying generalizations
down to particular cases, we'll look at inference to the best explanation and
arguments from analogy. We'll look at causal reasoning and
probability and decision making. So, it'll be a lot of different types of
inductive arguments covered in part three.
Then, in part four, we'll look at fallacies.
These are common and very tempting ways to make mistakes in arguments.
Some of them have to do with vagueness, others have to do with ambiguity, some of
them are irrelevance like arguments Ad Hominem and Appeals to Ignorance.
And we'll also look at a major fallacy called begging the question that people
commit all the time. And in the end, we'll teach you a general
method for spotting and avoiding these common mistakes,
so that'll be part four. And at the end of each part, we'll have a
short quiz with some questions to make sure you understood.
So, we're very glad to have you in this course and we're very honored to that
there are so many students in this course.
But that raises one problem, namely, we cannot answer emails from students.
So, please do not email us individually. There will be discussion forums where you
can go and talk to other students about the material in the course.
And, I bet that if you go to the those forums, not only will you get your
questions answered. But if you go to those forums and help
answer other peoples questions, everybody will learn more and that's what this
course is all about. So, thanks very much for joining us on
this adventure and we hope you stick with it because we've got a lot of fun and a
lot of important things to cover. One final recommendation.
We've done these lectures so that you can just watch the lectures by themselves,
and do the exercises and take the quizzes.
However, if you're listening to a lecture and you have a little trouble
understanding it, or if you're really fascinated and you
want to get more detail, then there is an accompanying textbook called
Understanding Arguments by myself and Robert Fogelin.
Many, many, many of the best ideas in this course come from him.
He's been a leader in this field of understanding arguments for many decades
and I owe an awful lot to him and I really appreciate that.
So, I wanted to do a little shout out of thanks to Robert Fogelin before we get
started on this course in the next lecture.