Critical Thinking

Course Description

This five-week course in critical thinking and informal logic helps students develop the ability to reason clearly and critically. It includes an introduction to the disciplines of inductive and deductive logic, fallacious reasoning, and problem-solving techniques. Emphasis is placed on the identification and management of the perception process, use of assumptions, emotional influences, and language in various forms of business communication.

Topics and Objectives

Critical Thinking: Purpose and Process

• Identify the critical thinking process.
• Explain the relationship of logic to critical thinking.

The Perception Process and its Influences

• Outline the perceptual process.
• Describe perceptual blocks to critical thinking: personal barriers, sensing, and physiology.

Analysis of the Use of Language in Thinking and Argument

• Explain the role of language in the critical thinking process.
• Explore the role of critical thinking in persuasion.

Assumptions: Critical Thinking and the Unknown

• Recognize assumptions in various situations.
• Compare and contrast necessary and unwarranted assumptions.
• Develop methods of checking assumptions and creating alternatives.

Logic versus Emotion

• Explain the impact of feelings on the critical thinking process.

Patterns of Fallacious Reasoning

• Recognize fallacies in written, oral, and visual arguments.
• Develop spontaneous oral or written arguments.

Elements and Composition of Argument

• Distinguish arguments from non-arguments.
• Identify the parts of an argument and their relationship to each other.
• Describe the role of analogy in argument.

Thinking Logically

• Apply sound rational reasoning to problem solving.
• Differentiate between inductive and deductive modalities of reasoning.
• Explore the structure and use of syllogisms in reasoning.
• Define the concepts of truth, validity, and soundness in a deductive argument.