Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
Improve your logical and critical thinking skills in this online course.
Summary
Identify common obstacles to effective thinking
We are constantly being given reasons to do and believe things: to believe that we should buy a product, support a cause, accept a job, judge someone innocent or guilty, that fairness requires us to do some household chore, and so on. Assessing the reasons we are given to do or believe these things calls upon us to think critically and logically.
Improve your logical and critical thinking skills
Even though we’re called upon to use our critical and logical thinking skills all the time, most of us are not that good at it. This online course aims to help you develop and improve these skills.
You’ll learn how to:
- identify and avoid common thinking mistakes that lead to the formation of bad beliefs
- recognise, reconstruct and evaluate arguments
- use basic logical tools to analyse arguments
- apply those tools in areas including science, moral theories and law
Associate Professor Tim Dare and Dr Patrick Girard from the University of Auckland take us on an informative and engaging eight week journey through the worlds of logical and critical thinking, helping us to avoid these common obstacles and fallacies and improve our logical and critical thinking skills.
Throughout the course, Tim and Patrick provide videos, articles, and assignments to lead us through the thickets of logical and critical thinking.
What topics will you cover?
- Identify common flaws in belief construction
- Recognise and reconstruct arguments
- Evaluate arguments as being good or bad
- Analyse arguments using basic logical tools
- Apply basic logical strategies in areas such as science, moral theories and law
Who this course is suitable for
This course is open to anyone with an interest in improving their logical and critical thinking skills. No previous knowledge or experience is required.
What you’ll achieve
By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to:
- Explore key concepts in logical and critical thinking
- Apply key concepts in logical and critical thinking
- Identify obstacles to logical and critical thinking
- Identify the components of a good argument
- Produce an argument in standard form
- Classify deductive and non-deductive arguments
- Evaluate arguments based on criteria such as validity, strength and cogency
- Interpret scientific, moral and legal arguments
- Develop an argument “in the wild”
- Assess arguments charitably
Who developed this course
The University of Auckland
The University of Auckland is New Zealand’s leading university and the only one included in the Times Higher Education top 200.