The Unicamp Extension School (Extecamp) and the Coursera platform are offering a free nine-week course on "Logic, Argumentation and Critical Thinking".
This is a free course, open to anyone interested in developing argumentation techniques and improving critical skills. It is especially recommended for high school students, university students, lawyers, journalists and people working in politics, among others. The classes will be taught by professors Walter Carnielli, from the Center for Logic, Epistemology and History of Science (CLE), and Juliana Bueno-Soler, from the Faculty of Technology (FT), both professors and researchers in the area of logic and philosophy of science .
According to Walter Carnielli, the connections between language and logic were clarified by Aristotle more than 2.300 years ago. Critical thinking would be a balanced combination of logic and language, essential for reasoning and argumentation. “Critical thinking involves looking at a situation from different perspectives, clarifying and evaluating the acceptability of assumptions, and coming to the most effective conclusion, which may be the solution to a problem,” he explains.
Carnielli assesses that the rationality of the world is at risk. Many people fall into the traps of misinformation and fake news due to lack of logic and deductive reasoning. “There are unscrupulous people - in politics, religion, propaganda and the media - who take advantage of this weakness, spreading fake news, posting dubious content and influencing elections and democracy”, he warns.
For Juliana Bueno-Soler, logic and reasoning are also crucial in career development. She considers basic knowledge of argumentation and critical reasoning to be essential in all areas, whether in administration, law, finance, nursing, journalism, engineering, physics, chemistry, biology or computing.
One of the advantages of the course is that it offers simple training in language, basic logic and reasoning to make people capable of expanding their range of knowledge and learning on their own. “When we are faced with an everyday situation, or a difficult issue to resolve, logic can be applied to obtain better results.”
Critical thinking, says Carnielli, gives people the chance to use their reasoning skills to analyze, evaluate and plan strategically. This allows us to identify fallacies and make impartial decisions without being influenced by propaganda of any kind. “With critical thinking, we acquire the means to judge well. It allows us to face practically any situation and discover the reasons for what happens. With that, mwe improve our ability to form solid judgments and evaluate other people’s arguments”, he explains.
Teachers cite some of the gains for students who participate in the course, such as, for example, hcommunication skills. Such skills will be improved, as the student will be able to present ideas through systematic and reasoned arguments. Another gain would be to build and defend one's own points of view in an elegant and non-violent way and also writing skills, learning to write for different situations, such as petitions, school work, theses and dissertations, reports, social media, etc.
Teachers list the skills that the student will be able to incorporate upon completing the course: understanding thinking as a logical and linguistic process; identify and evaluate premises, arguments, beliefs and evidence; understand the elements of logic; understand the concepts of valid, weak, bad and strong arguments; think critically about media, including social media, evaluate moral and political issues; use critical reasoning to solve problems; refute bad arguments and construct better arguments; communicate more effectively in both spoken and written form; defend yourself against fake News, denialism and misinformation.
Check out the course syllabus:
-Arguments, language and logic
-The limits of argument and good arguments
-Repairing arguments and evaluating premises
-Complex logic and arguments
-How to generalize and avoid mistakes
-How to avoid fallacies
-How to reason well with analogies and numbers
-How to make decisions and reason well with cause and effect
-How to defend yourself from attacks and fake news
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Course offered by Unicamp is featured on the Coursera platform
