SYLLABUS – ARGUMENT ANALYSIS



Syllabus – Philosophy 223

Argument Analysis

College of Arts and Letters, Department of Philosophy

Fall Semester, 2009 - 3 Credit Hours;

Tuesday and Thursday:

9:35-10:50 and 11:10-12:25, LA 114

 

Instructor Information:

Dr. Michael Malone. Email: Michael.malone@nau.edu. Phone/Voice-mail: (928) 523-7090. Office: BAA 304. Office hours: 12:45-2:00 Tues. and Thurs, or by appointment.

There is a web site for the course at . It will contain the syllabus, directions for assignments, answers to exercise problems, etc. You may download exercise problems from the site, do the work on them, and attach them to an email message sent to the email address listed above. Or you may submit hard copies in class.

 

Course Materials:

Text: Argument Analysis, by Michael Malone, with David Sherry. Available only at University Texts and Tools.

About the Course:

This course teaches basic techniques of logical analysis and applies them to the types of reasoned discourse that students meet with in textbooks and in their efforts to become informed citizens. For a more complete description of what you will learn, read the Course Objectives at the end of the syllabus.

 

Assignments and Grading:

 

Reading Assignments and Quizzes, 10-15 points each. The subject matter of the book develops in such a way that the book is to be read in the written order. We will begin with page 1 and go as far as we can. We will at least finish Chapter 3, and if there is time, I can add another chapter. Reading assignments will be made at least one week in advance of the day they will be discussed. The reading quizzes will ask questions about the vocabulary introduced in the reading assigned for the day of the quiz. I will give the quiz at or near the beginning of the class session and I will not announce it ahead of time. You may ask me questions about the reading before the class takes a quiz. If you ask me a question that is on the quiz, I will answer it (correctly), but I won’t tell you that it is on the quiz. Since we discuss the quizzes as soon as I have collected them, if you are absent on the day of a quiz, or if you arrive after I have collected a quiz, you may not make it up.

 

Homework, 10 points each. To assign due dates of the exercises at the beginning of the semester would unnecessarily lock us into a calendar when there might be a need to slow down at certain points and speed up at others. I will announce a few days ahead of time when each exercise is due, but you can count on submitting one exercise per week, on average. Since each exercise contains many problems, I will probably not assign all of them to be handed in as homework. I will grade all of what I assign for both completeness and accuracy. The exercises will be taken directly from the textbook. For your own benefit, I encourage you to do as many of the problems as you can, and we will do several in class. You may ask me questions in class, by phone or email about homework problems as you are doing them. I won’t do them for you, but I will help you to get on the right track. Since I will make available the answers to exercise problems shortly after the due date, as a rule I will accept no late homework.

 

Outside Projects, at least 180 points total. There will be at least three outside projects, of increasing complexity and point value. For a more detailed description of the assignments, read Outside Projects and Approved Sources for Outside Projects on the web site. Since no two students will be working on the same piece of discourse, it will take a while to grade these. But again, whether I will accept a late assignment is entirely at my discretion.

 

Mid-term and Final Exams, 100 points each. You will be required to answer reading questions, and to analyze pieces of discourse containing reasoning using the techniques we study. You will take these exams in class.  The tentative date for the Mid-term Exam will be Tuesday, October 21. That will give me time to grade and return it before the last day you can drop with a W, which is Friday, October 24. The final exam will be held at the time indicated in the university final exam schedule.

 

Final Grade:

Your final grade will be determined by the percentage of possible points you earned from graded assignments. A=90%, B=80%, C=70%, D=60%. About 40% of the grade will be based on quizzes and homework.

Attendance:

I expect you to attend class regularly and to have read the assignment before coming to class. If you miss class more than three times, you can expect an adverse effect on your final grade.

Academic Honesty:

 

I encourage you to work together, but anything you submit for a grade must be your own work. If you are caught cheating in any way, you will receive a failing grade for the course.

Course Objectives

By the end of the semester you should be able to tell whether an extended text (25 sentences or more) from a textbook used in another university course, an editorial or a magazine article contains reasoning. You should be able to represent the reasoning as one or more arguments. You should also be able to determine the soundness of an argument by appropriate standards of evidence, and validity or inductive strength. In order to do these things, you must be able to:

• recognize whether the main purpose of the reasoning is persuasion, explanation or discovery;

• make use of argument indicators and discount expressions to identify premises and conclusions;

• recognize whether an author intends a string of words as a statement – i.e., is claiming that it is true - or intends it as a clause in a complex statement formed with one of the logical particles;

• recognize when an argument has one or more implicit statements and identify the most logical candidate for it, or them;

• represent the structure of an argument, either by means of a diagram or one or more common sentential strategies such as modus ponens or modus tollens;

• paraphrase to make the structure of an argument clear – e.g., replace pronouns with their referents, rephrase figurative language, recognize when two statements are stylistic variants of one another, clarify vagueness and ambiguity, etc.;

• identify rhetorically significant but logically insignificant devices, such as stage setting, examples, amplifications, hedges and assurances from the argument they annotate;

• construct a counterexample to demonstrate that an inference is invalid or inductively weak, and use the counterexample to identify implicit premises;

• provide a rationale for assigning basic reasons to one of the following categories –

(a) those that could not be called into question (the background of logical appraisal)

(b) those that carry a presumption of truth (to doubt them requires special info)

(c) those that convey a burden of truth on the author

(d) those that are intractably vague;

• recognize that a piece of discourse contains an argument criticizing another argument, either by giving a counterexample to an inference, falsifying a basic reason (either directly or indirectly) or showing that a basic reason has a false presupposition.

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