[BLANK_AUDIO]. Hi. Welcome to our Coursera course. This is the first time we've ever taught an online course, and we're very excited about it. >> All right! [LAUGH]. >> I'm Walter Sinnott-Armstrong from Duke University. And my co-teacher is Ram Neta from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Say hi, Ram. >> 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're lots of wacky examples where people make silly mistakes and 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 effect your life in various ways. We're not going to try to 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 matter 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's 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, 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 a 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, we'll 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 because 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 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 evaluations are going to depend a lot on what the purpose of the argument is. Some arguments try to be valid in a logical way [SOUND] 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, then 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 that 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. The very tempting ways to make mistakes in arguments. Some of them have to do with vaugeness. 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 that there's 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 those forums, not only will you get your questions answered, but if you go to those forums and help answer other people's 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're having 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 awful lot to him and I really appreciate that. So, I want to do a little shout out to thanks to Robert Fogelin before we get started on this course and the next lecture.
