Critical Thinking and Argumentation

Code: FIL02321L

6 ECTS

Duration: 15 weeks/156 hours

Scientific Area: Philosophy

Teaching languages: Portuguese

Languages of tutoring support: Portuguese

Regime de Frequência: Presencial

Sustainable Development Goals

Educação de qualidade - Assegurar a educação inclusiva, e equitativa e de qualidade, e promover oportunidades de aprendizagem ao longo da vida para todos.

Learning Goals

This course on critical thinking intends to contribute to a better performance of students whenever they have:
?to critically react to what they read in books, journals, newspapers or on the internet;
?to judge the quality of a speech or of a lecture;
?to actively participate in classes and seminars;
?to build an argument of their own;
?to write an essay in defense of a certain conclusion.

Identification of questions and arguments
Arguments: conclusions and reasons
Implicit premises
Intermediary conclusions
Language: vagueness and ambiguity
Kinds of definitions
Facts and values
Objective and subjective judgements
Representing arguments with diagrams
Does the conclusion follow from the premises?
Probability in the premises
Strong and weak inductions
Principles of rational discussion
Main Mistakes in the assessment of premises
Mistaking the person for the argument
Disjunctive claims and how to deny them
Conditional claims and how to deny them
Necessary and sufficient conditions
Reasoning from an hypothesis
Contrafactual reasoning
Objecting and refuting
Presenting and assessing
Formal fallacies and fallacies of content
Reasoning by analogy
Numbers: graphs and averages
Generalizing: detecting non-represen