Critical Thinking

In his 2005 book On Bullshit, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt (1929-2023) wrote that: "One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes their share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.” Frankfurt defines 'bullshit' as content that is presented to us without any regard for the truth, but for some other reason: for example, to persuade us, or to gain our attention. Given that definition, Frankfurt's comment applies even more to our world today much more than it did in 2005. In fact, with the advent of generative AI systems, we live in an era in which the total quantity of bullshit in our cognitive environment is constantly increasing. So, it's more important than ever to be able to distinguish the true from the false, the rational from the irrational, and the logical from the illogical. And that requires the ability to reason well. Even as generative AI systems like ChatGPT grow increasingly capable of reasoning, the ability to think independently remains essential to human dignity, freedom, and moral responsibility. Intellectual autonomy is what allows us to question authority, challenge prevailing norms, and make sense of our lives beyond what is suggested or computed for us. Without the ability to reason for ourselves, we risk becoming passive recipients of information rather than active participants in shaping our world. Generative AI can support our thinking, but it cannot replace our uniquely human capacity to reflect, doubt, and choose in ways that are bound up with conscience, creativity, and our lived experiences. But reasoning, and especially reasoning well, is not easy. The aim of this course is to help you to learn to reason better, and therefore to make better decisions, by learning three main things: 1. Why our natural psychological biases make it hard for us to reason well, and what we can do to mitigate those biases; 2. What reasoning well actually consists in; in other words, what it means to be sensitive to the evidential and logical relations between different claims; and 3. How to extract and analyse arguments from what people or AIs write or say, in order to assess whether we should accept their conclusions and recommendations. To be a little more specific, in the module we'll learn about cognitive biases and how to mitigate them; what an argument is; what makes an argument (logically) good or bad; what makes a claim evidence for another claim; how we might fail in our search for evidence; how to extract an argument from a piece of text, in order to assess whether we should accept it; what the difference is between having an opinion and knowing something, being scepticism and being sensitive to evidence, and between lying and bullshitting; what the typical forms of bad argument are; and finally, about logical paradoxes (such as that generated by the statement ‘This sentence is not true’), which seem to threaten our most basic assumptions about good reasoning. The module is taught by me, Dr. Daniel Esmonde Deasy (Associate Professor, UCD School of Philosophy), and is delivered in the form of two 50-minute face-to-face lectures per week of term, and seven 50-minute face-to-face tutorials with a graduate tutor. Lectures consist primarily in the presentation of material by the lecturer, and tutorials involve active discussion of the material and non-graded exercises. The module is not difficult, but it should reward those who engage with it with valuable skills they can apply throughout their lives. I welcome students of all kinds to join this module: not just philosophy students, but also students from any other discipline in the university; students at any stage of their UG degree; exchange, Erasmus and study abroad students; students for whom English is not a first language; mature students; Open Learning students; and so on. Critical thinking is for everyone, and the more diverse the class, the better. If you'd like to see last year's syllabus, just email me at daniel.deasy@ucd.ie.