SSH 105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: False Premise, Agnosticism, Argument From Analogy

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Social Sciences and Humanities
• Course: SSH 105
• Professor: David Hunter

Document Summary

Critical thinking is reasonable reflective thinking aimed at deciding what to believe or what to do. 1 ct requires having good epistemic reasons (evidence) 2 how to define our evidence, beliefs and decisions. From a reliable source; not undermined or overridden. 5 valid reasoning about alternatives and necessary and sufficient conditions. A lot of our ordinary reasoning is based on comparing one thing with another on analogies: john is ge(cid:374)e(cid:396)ous, a(cid:374)d his (cid:271)(cid:396)othe(cid:396) pete(cid:396) is just like hi(cid:373), so pete(cid:396)(cid:859)s p(cid:396)o(cid:271)a(cid:271)l(cid:455) generous too. I just tried a spoonful of the soup and it was bland. We should add more salt to the pot. But this sort of reasoning is also common in the natural and social sciences: 80% of those we surveyed believed that student tuition is too high. Canadians think that tuition rates are too high: driving while on the phone is like driving while drunk, and it is illegal to drive drunk.