BUS202 CLASS

BUS202 CRITICAL THINKING CLASS

MODULE 3 CHAPTERS 4-5

Assignment: Chapter 4: Perceiving and Believing

Q1. Actively Selecting, Organizing, and Interpreting Sensations: Most of the time, you select, organize, and interpret sensations automatically, without conscious thought. Describe a time when sensation and perception were not automatic, and instead, you were confused by what you were sensing. Why were you confused? What did you do to try to organize and interpret the information you were getting? When this happens again, what strategies can you use to try to understand what is going on?

Q2. Perceiving and Believing: Our beliefs are based on thinking about our perceptions, and they take the form of interpretations, evaluations, conclusions, and predictions. Give one example of each of these four categories of beliefs from your own beliefs about families.

Q3. Believing and Perceiving: Identify one of your personal beliefs that has been strengthened by your perceptions of the world around you. How does what you perceive reinforce what you believe?

Q4. Types of Beliefs: Reports, Inferences, Judgments: Think about your job, a sport you play, or a hobby you enjoy. List three types of beliefs you have about this activity—a report (fact), an inference, and a judgment.

Q5. Reporting Factual Information: Think about the dormitory, apartment, or house in which you live. State a fact about this place. How can you ensure that the fact is accurate and not a misperception?

Q6. Inferring: Think about the dormitory, apartment, or house in which you live. What can you infer, or conclude, about this place based on your perceptions of it? What factual evidence backs up your inference?

Q7. Judging: Think about the dormitory, apartment, or house in which you live. What is your judgment or evaluation of this place? On what criteria do you base your judgment? How would you justify these criteria?

Assignment: Chapter 5: Constructing Knowledge

Q1. Believing and Knowing: List three beliefs about friendship that you hold. Evaluate each of these beliefs as completely accurate, generally accurate, generally not accurate, or definitely not accurate. In your view which of these beliefs, if any, qualify as knowledge?

Q2. Knowledge and Truth: The three stages of knowing (Garden of Eden, Anything Goes, and Thinking Critically) can be applied to many aspects of life. Identify an area in your personal or professional life in which you are in the (1) Garden of Eden stage, (2) Anything Goes stage, and (3) Thinking Critically stage. Explain why you are in each stage for a particular area and whether you expect to progress (or fall back) a stage.

Q3. Thinking Critically About Your Beliefs: Identify one of your personal beliefs and evaluate it. Did you adopt this belief with little thought, or do you have reasons or evidence for this belief? Explain.

Q4. Using Perspective-Taking to Achieve Knowledge: Think of an issue that is dividing your community. What are other people's perspectives on this issue? How do these perspectives influence your own point of view? Are you satisfied that your perspective is backed by sound critical thinking? If not, what do you need to do to achieve knowledge of this issue?

Q5. Beliefs Based on Indirect Experience: When politicians campaign for office, they often make claims about what they will do once elected and why you shouldn't vote for their opponents. How have you evaluated campaign claims in the past? How have they influenced your vote? In the future, how might you apply your knowledge of evaluating beliefs to determine who you will vote for?

MODULE 5 CHAPTERS 7-8

Assignment: Chapter 7: Forming and Applying Concepts

Q1. What Are Concepts? What are your concepts for weekdays and weekends? Are your concepts for weekdays and weekends the same today as they were five years ago? Explain.

Q2. The Structure of Concepts: Using the three-part structure of concepts gives you a framework to describe anything you encounter. Look around and choose an object nearby. Use the three-part structure of a concept to describe it: (1) its sign (name), (2) its properties (qualities), and (3) its referents (examples). Now do the same thing for an abstract concept like thinking or love.

Q3. Forming Concepts: Form a concept for an action film or a romantic comedy. Start with several examples of films, and then generalize them by identifying what they have in common. Then come up with additional examples that fit your generalizations.

Q4. Applying Concepts: In the classroom you are classified as a student. Outside school you can be classified in many other ways. List five ways you can be classified outside school. Which, if any, of these classifications mean a lot to you? Why?

Q5. Defining Concepts: Give an effective definition of the concept, career. List the general qualities that make up the boundary of the concept and provide key examples that illustrate the concept.

Q6. Relating Concepts with Mind Maps: Under what circumstances might making a mind map be useful to you on the job? At home?

Assignment: Chapter 8: Relating and Organizing

Q1. Chronological and Process Relationships: Most of the tasks you perform you do without thinking. But suppose you had to teach someone else to perform a task? Choose a household chore or work task that you'd like to delegate, and write instructions for performing it. How can you check that your instructions are correct and easy to follow?

Q2. Comparative and Analogic Relationships: Comparing and contrasting two things is a methodical way to help you decide which thing is better. Think of a recent occasion when you faced a choice between two things. This could be deciding on a clothing purchase, choosing a movie to see, or planning a weekend outing. List the similarities and differences between your choices. How did you decide what to do?

Q3. Causal Relationships: Even though we are aware that lifestyle choices, such as smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, poor diet, and lack of exercise, can all contribute to health problems, such knowledge is often not enough to ensure we make healthy choices. Think of your own life experiences. Describe a time when new information led you to change your behavior and provided the causal chain of events that led up to this change.

MODULE 6 CHAPTERS 9-10

Assignment: Chapter 9: Thinking Critically About Moral Issues

Q1. What Is Ethics? People such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa use their moral stature to influence entire societies. Though they are not as well known, many of us have encountered people whose moral values influence those around them. Identify one such person in your life and describe a situation in which this person influenced your actions.

Q2. Your Moral Compass: The text identifies seven moral theories that describe the way people reason and make decisions about moral issues: (1) psychological, (2) agnostic, (3) ethical egoism, (4) divine command, (5) hedonist, (6) authoritarian, and (7) altruistic. Which of these theories or approaches to moral decision making did you use as a child? As an adult, which of them appeals to you? Why?

Q3. The Thinker's Guide to Moral Decision Making: It can be difficult to know what the right thing is, and it can be even more difficult actually to do the right thing in a given situation. Think of a moral decision you had to make in the past. How did you decide what to do? Did you make the right decision? Given what you've learned about moral reasoning in this chapter, would you change either your approach to that moral dilemma, or your decision? Explain.

Q4. Bonus: The Ethic of Care: The Ethic of Care asks us to think about the importance of relationships when it comes to our moral judgments, rather than being an impartial moral decision maker. Describe a situation in which a special relationship (parent–child, teacher–student, neighbor–neighbor, etc.) would lead you to treat a family member better than a stranger. What does this make you think about the goal of impartiality?

Assignment: Chapter 10: Constructing Arguments

Q1. Recognizing Arguments: The text uses the issue of legalizing marijuana to illustrate how to recognize conclusions and reasons in an argument. Think of another public issue that is important to you, such as reinstating the draft or changing the drinking age, and provide reasons for your position on the issue and a conclusion.

Q2. Evaluating Arguments: Think of a recent argument you've heard that takes a position on a local issue. What was the conclusion, and what were the reasons offered to support the conclusion? Was the argument sound? Explain.

Q3. Understanding Deductive Arguments: In a deductive argument, if the premises (reasons) are assumed to be true, then the conclusion based on those premises must be true. Give an example of a deductive argument from your work or personal life, identifying the premises and the conclusion.

Q4. Constructing Extended Arguments: Think of a time when you have constructed a longer or extended argument either at work, with your family, or a friend (it doesn't matter if you actually wrote out the argument or simply engaged in debate). What type of reasons did you offer and where did they come from? Which, if any, of the deductive argument forms that you've learned about did you use to construct this argument?

MODULE 7

Assignment: Chapter 11: Reasoning Critically

Q1. Inductive Reasoning: In your experience, how influential are surveys and polls? Have you ever changed your behavior based on survey or poll results? If so, explain what happened. If not, why not?

Q2. Empirical Generalization: You probably use empirical generalization when you meet a new group of people. For example, when you start a new job, you meet a few employees of your new company and form impressions of the company as a whole. Think about a situation in which you used empirical generalization to draw conclusions about a large group based on meeting just a few people. What did you conclude? On what was your conclusion based? How accurate was your reasoning? How would you revise your initial conclusions now?

Q3. Fallacies of False Generalization: In a diverse society, fallacies of false generalization are common. Think about one of the groups you belong to—gender, ethnic, professional, or geographical—and identify a common fallacy of false generalization about this group. How would you argue against this fallacy?

Q4. Causal Reasoning: Identify a problem or situation in your own life, and apply the steps of the scientific method to explain what the problem is and identify a possible solution. Do you find this pattern of reasoning helpful for an everyday problem? Why or why not?

Q5. Causal Fallacies: When trying to make sense of the world, people frequently make causal fallacies: questionable cause, misidentification of the cause, post hoc ergo propter hoc, and slippery slope. Give an example of a causal fallacy you made recently. Why was your reasoning unsound?

Q6. Fallacies of Relevance: Fallacies of relevance are often used when sound reasoning may not be persuasive. For example, advertisers may promote their products using bandwagon appeals, and politicians may campaign using appeals to fear. Do you find that the use of such fallacies can be justified? Or is it wrong to deliberately use such appeals? Give examples from your own experience to support your position.

Q7. The Critical Thinker's Guide to Reasoning: Think of a problem or issue that has been bothering you lately. How might applying a critical thinking/reasoning model to the issue help you sort it out? For example, how might it be useful to explore the reasons for your point of view on an issue and to explore various other viewpoints on the issue?