This is a new course. I designed it to replace an informal logic course. The older course covered only the beginnings of logic. I wanted to do more, enough so that the course would fulfill the quantitative reasoning requirement. My experience in teaching logic and related courses over twenty years has led me to appreciate the value to students of learning how to use what I will call thinking tools.
Logic is one such tool.
I call it a thinking tool because if you compare the thinking or reasoning that people do without it to the thinking or reasoning that people do with it, you will see a great improvement. Logic, for example, is a tool that has been worked on by brilliant thinkers for over 2000 years. Using it enables you to avoid many errors that you would otherwise make. The main theme of this course s that a significant improvement in reasoning is possible by using well-developed thinking tools instead of relying on untutored common sense. The specific tools that we cover in Philosophy 1250 are logic, probability, decision theory, and game theory.