By Nick Louzon (general major at UG, took class only a few days of a week, no camara in classroom, sold boardgame before master and phd, so funny)

Syllabus PHIL 102 Fall 2023.1.pdf

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Assignments

Argument Reconstruction 1

Argument Reconstruction 2

Ch1 Good Reasoning

• Knowledge v.s. opinion. Knowledge is factive.
• Reason: premise
• reasoning: the attempt to answer a question by thinking about reasons, as in the sentence He stood in the polling booth, reasoning one last time about the relative merits of the two candidates. Typically, it’s forward looking.
• Good reasoning: the thinking most likely to result in your having good reasons for your answers—and, thus, the sort of thinking most likely to give you knowledge rather than mere opinion.
  • Good reasoning does not guarantee knowledge. Reasoning is not affecting the world, it’s affected by the world.
• Arguments
  • Arguments ****are the means by which we express reasons in natural/formal language.
  • Arguments are models of reasoning. Even a very good argument drops some of the features of reasoning, because it is usually not necessary to represent all the surrounding activities, e.g. motivation beyond truth (“Getting an idea is one thing. Having support for the idea is quite another.”), bias.
• Good arguments
  • Good arguments needs to have true premises (the fit of the premises with the world), good logic (the fit of the conclusion with the evidence), conversational relevance (the fit of the argument with the conversation), and clarity (that it must be possible to tell whether these three kinds of fit exist).
  • Sound (usually mostly for deductive arguments): logical and have true premises
• Shortcuts of reasoning
  • Vividness shortcut / availability heuristic: “tend to rely heavily on whatever information is the most vivid”
  • Similarity shortcut
  • Conservation shortcut: “tend to preserve beliefs you have previously adopted”
• Causal explanation v.s. rational explanation
  • the process of forming ideas is less important to good reasoning: not the reasoning for believing, but surely good for understanding and also future motivation
  • Why are you giving me the argument v.s. what’s the argument
• Intellectual virtues: “habits of thinking that are conducive to knowledge”
  • Critical reflection: “develop the habit of asking what the arguments are for your beliefs and whether those arguments are sound, clear, and relevant.”
  • Empirical inquiry: “seeking out new evidence from the world around you in order to better answer your questions.”
  • Intellectual honesty: “the habit of wanting, above all, to know the truth about the questions you care about”
    • “Three of the biggest impediments to intellectual honesty are self-interest / wishful thinking, cultural conditioning, and overconfidence.”

Ch2 What makes an argument

• Statements: sentences that can be true of false, and serves a declarative function. E.g. “I’m sick of …”
• Non-statement sentences / function
  • Exclamatory: express strong emotion, e.g. “Go illini”
  • Imperative: forms a command or makes a request
  • Interrogative: ask a question
  • Performative: performs some function by being asserted