Learning outcomes
The focus of the course is on the acquisition of the skill of discerning and evaluating arguments found in scientific (or more broadly, academic) texts. The aim of the course is to provide students with analytic tools that enable and facilitate the construction and assessment of justifications for hypotheses and theories. On completing the course, the students will have a strong working grasp of different types of arguments, their interplay and the fallacies related to them. On a more general level, the students will gain an appreciation of the nature and role of rational, intersubjective justification of claims as part of scientific inquiry.
Course contents
1. Justification: Assertions and grounds
2. Argumentation as a form of justification: types of arguments, types of fallacies
3. Deductive reasoning and its uses in justification
4. Observation, data, statistical inference: inductive reasoning and its uses in justification
5. Causal and hypothetical inference
6. Theoretical virtues and justification
Place: to be announced
Course schedule
17.1.2018 at 10-16 o'clock, Room A2A (Main building)
24.1.2018 at 10-16 o'clock, Room A2A (Main building)
31.1.2018 at 10-16 o'clock, Room D13 (Main building)
7.2.2018 at 10-16 o'clock, Room Pinni B 4113
Teacher: PhD Antti Keskinen
Evaluation criteria
The course work consists of lectures, discussions and exercises. As the aim of the course is the acquisition of a practical skill of assessing arguments, special emphasis will be put on discussion and exercises. Passing the course requires active participation, and the production of a short essay (appr. 5 pages) in which the student applies the skills acquired during the course to her/his own research topic.
Evaluation
Pass/fail
Enrolment in NettiOpsu. Maximum group size 40. Selection method is draw.