Midterm

The midterm will be held at the beginning of class on Monday, November 1st. It's worth 15% of your overall grade, and will cover everything we've done in class so far:

• definitions of 'logic,' 'reasoning,' and 'argument'
  
• evaluating arguments
• types of arguments:
  -deductive (aim for certainty, are valid/invalid and sound/unsound)
  -inductive (generalizing from examples, depend on large, representative samples)
  -args about cause/effect (correlation vs. causation)
  -abductive (inferences to the best explanation)
  
• the 12 fallacies covered in class so far
  

Get to studying!

Murder on the Abductive Express

Here's a paper that explains why I disagree with our textbook's explanation of the scientific method. It's important to consider and test multiple possible explanations rather than a single hypothesis:

• J.R. Platt's "Strong Inference" (pdf)

(NOTE: Platt uses the word "inductive" in a more general way than we do in class, to refer to any non-deductive kind of reasoning--that is, arguments that don't attempt to absolutely prove their conclusion.)

Also, in honor of abductive arguments, here's a dinosaur comic murder mystery.



P.S. I'm halfway through reading this book: Inference to the Best Explanation by Peter Lipton.