feist-htp-1105-fall-2020-module-1-critical-thinking-assignment-sgbrjni5-e4ihz15e.docx Faculté de philosophie Faculty of Philosophyosophy HTP 1105, Fall 2021 -- Instructor: Dr. Feist – Critical Thinking Assignment This assignment is based on the readings and lectures in Module 1, Critical Thinking. (Arguments/Fallacies/Belief.) This assignment is worth 10% of the grade I assign you. (This translates into 7.5% of the final grade in the course.) The assignment is due: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 10:00 PM. --No extensions without a doctor’s note. --Late submissions immediately lose 15% and then are further penalized 15%/day. Instructions: (Follow these carefully. You will lose marks if you do not.) · Submit as a Word file (No PDFs. Incorrect file format loses 15%.) · Submit your file to the Critical Thinking Exercises Drop Box on BSpace. (Incorrect folder submission loses 15%.) · Name your file as follows: “first name, last name, HTP 1105, fall 2021, Assignment 1”. (Incorrectly named files lose 15%.) · Complete all questions in all 5 parts of the assignment. Marks are in bold. You will be graded on content and on writing. For instance, (2/1) means 2 marks for content and 1 for writing. There are a total of 86 marks on the assignment. · Use the marks awarded per question as a guide to how long your answer should be. There is no need to pad answers. Write as clearly and concisely as you can. For example, if the question is straightforward and worth a mark or two, your answer should be a sentence or two. · This assignment is designed to be done in 2 to 3 hours maximum. Use that to budget your time and deciding how long your answers should be. Part I: Short Answer Questions (15 marks total) 1. What are the 2 main parts of an argument? (2/1) 2. Explain what “validity” means. (2/1) 3. Explain trivial validity. (2/1) 4. Explain soundness. (2/1) 5. Explain trivial soundness. (2/1) Part II: Fallacies—Identification (32 marks total) Each of the following is a fallacy. For each, name the fallacy (English terms are acceptable) and explain your answer. 7. Joe must be guilty since he cannot show that he is innocent. (3/1) 8. Joe must be wrong since he is quite loathsome. (3/1) 9. Einstein was great at physics; he would be a great basketball team coach. (3/1) 10. That book contains all truths; it says so on the first page. (3/1) 11. I was very stressed by that logic assignment so I should get a good grade. (3/1) 12. It seems strange to me but everyone else thinks it is just fine so I guess that I am wrong. (3/1) 13. Either you agree with me or you’re insane. (3/1) 14. I drank a lot of rum and coke then became sick. I drank a lot of vodka and ginger ale then became sick. It must be the pop that is making me sick. (3/1) Part III: Critical Thinking—An Application to Ethics (6 marks total) 15. What is cultural relativism in ethics? (1/1) 16. Do you agree with cultural relativism? Why is it problematic? Is it possible to demonstrate that it is true or false? Explain your answers. (3/1) Part IV: Belief (8 marks total) 17. Explain the mental state theory of belief and the behavioural theory of belief. What are the problems of each? What do you think that a belief is? Defend your answer. (6/2) Part V: Essay Question -- 500-700 words (15/10) The concept of free speech has become quite controversial in recent times. Some argue that it should be preserved at all costs, regardless of how offensive it may be whereas others argue that it is perfectly legitimate to suppress offensive speech. Using our discussions of arguments, fallacies, cultural relativism and tolerance, take a stand on free speech and argue for or against it. (Supplementary Note: The task here is for you to take a clear stand on the issue of free speech as well as articulate what you think that it is. I am looking for clarity of expression of view as well as the coherency and consistency of the defence of it. I am NOT looking for a particular viewpoint. I am looking to see if you can construct an argument for a position.) HTP 1105, Fall 2021, Critical Thinking Assignment, Dr. FEIST Page 1 of 2 part2-xxqrqz05.pdf Dialectical Logic / 91 another if we need to express, in more detail, the relations between discrimi- nated objects at the most basic level. We can express the relations between colours through the relations be- tween different wavelengths of light, for example. In so doing we substitute for the experience which we usually call “seeing red” another experience relevant to our mode of determining wave lengths. It is interesting to notice what is going on here. We associate colours with wavelengths of light because we discover that the relevant experience classes can be correlated. But the correlation is not just “given”—it is not, say, like the relation between the business cycle and the length of women’s skirts. Colouredness is related to notions of spatial surface and to notions of “seeing.” “Light” is a notion that explicates both these further notions. Our ordinary mode of experiencing shuts out certain kinds of data. If one could “see” photons, for instance, one could not “see” anything else. We thus seek other sorts of experiences that will illumine other aspects of the situation. The move is from “seeing colours” to features of the specific exclusion reference of notions of colouredness, and back again to other experience forms that are not similarly excluded. The ability to see colours demands that there be some other structure that renders the process intelligible. We trace this through its conceptual connections and then trace those to other modes of experience. Thus there is not a brute “given” associated with any of the “objects” of knowledge—though there is always some given relative to any structure we choose. We can now choose between several procedures: one would be to gener- ate the succession of basic concepts in the dialectic from “pure being” through to whatever conceptual structure might bring an end to the process of genera- tion. At each level we could seek the appropriate experiences and so build up a picture of the world. This would give a set of general answers to questions about the available conceptual framework, the available levels of experience and so on. It was some procedure like this which Hegel undertook in his Science of Logic and in the Phenomenology of Mind,12 a work that sought to reveal a dialectic of experience that would go with the dialectic of concepts in the Logic.13 But although Hegel may at times have looked forward to generating a complete system of knowledge (represented in part in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences), it must be obvious that beyond the generation of a structure that would cast light on general metaphysical issues, we cannot expect to generate such a complete system all at once. Many kinds of experi- ences would have to be sought, an untold range of concepts generated, and the relations between endless interlocking systems of concepts investigated. If we could not answer any serious questions about particular issues until we had a complete conceptual system and a complete system of knowledge, we would be in a bad way. Armour, L., & Feist, R. (2005). Inference and persuasion : An introduction to logic and critical reasoning. ProQuest Ebook Central
http://ebookcentral.proquest.comCreated from ottawa on 2021-10-02 17:42:17. C op yr ig ht © 2 00 5. F er nw oo d P ub lis hi ng . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . 92 / INFERENCE AND PERSUASION 14. Dialectics and the Incompleteness of Knowledge: Dialectical Logics and Other Logics Another procedure, then, the one we might use for more straightforward and mundane inquiries, would have to be constructed rather differently. It would have to start, generally, with questions raised because we face what William James and John Dewey liked to call “live options.”14 A question that involves a live option, in their terms, is posed by a fork in the structure of experience or in a logical structure with which we are presented. In a sense, we are always in this position because we outrun any system that we have constructed up to the moment. A judgement, as Dewey would have it, represents our decision to take one option rather than another. We ask if apples are edible, and we choose to eat them or not. We ask if it is the angels who win football games for Notre Dame and we bet our money or we don’t. But at the same time, we want to know what goes into these judgements, and we need a way to make them more objective—to assure ourselves that we are moving generally in the direction of sound judgement with each inference move (and not continuously away from it), and we want, finally, to achieve that condition of freedom that set off our inquiry in the first chapter. Such a structure, like Dewey’s, must represent propositions and infer- ences as open-ended structures—structures focused on a judgement that is subject to change as new elements are entered. Such structures must then represent both forms of certainty and forms of uncertainty and be structured so as to have growth points. Ideally, all that we know at a given time should be representable in a single structure that can be revised in several dimensions. For even a simple query like “are apples edible?” has implications that extend over the realm of what is known. (Eating anything will make some change in one’s body chemistry, which will alter in some way, however insignificant, our susceptibility to things like radiation from distant parts of the universe, or which may change our glandular secretions so as to make us more or less susceptible to emotions generated by certain kinds of literature and so on.) Once again, however, our practical situation tends to dictate that the available information be assembled according to degrees of relevance. Though we should express the logical situation in a way that will make it possible for all judgements to bear upon one another and, ultimately, for them to be amalga- mated, the actual situation is bound to