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: Room 120 (Virta building, main campus)

Course schedule

16.1.2017 at 10-16 o'clock

23.1.2017 at 10-16 o'clock

30.1.2017 at 10-16 o'clock

6.2.2017 at 10-16 o'clock

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.