Critical Thinking and Scientific Inquiry

This course develops students’ abilities to reason well about scientific claims, scientific research, and the nature, value, and limits of scientific inquiry. To reason well about scientific claims, students understand and apply central scientific concepts, such as experiment, explanation, cause, effect, correlation, random sampling, testability, prediction, verification, and falsification. In addition, students evaluate instances of reasoning with such concepts by evaluating arguments for and against scientific claims and assessing the significance of possible outcomes of experiments. To reason well about the nature, value, and limits of scientific inquiry, students are introduced to central issues in the philosophy of science, such as the demarcation between science and pseudo-science, the reliability of scientific research, and the (un)reasonableness of beliefs about claims, such as moral and other normative claims, that fall outside the scope of sciences.

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