BAEcon Economics

The course focuses on the nature, purpose, and evaluation of arguments. You will learn what arguments are and what they are for; also how to identify an argument in conversation or text, to identify and understand its structure, and to evaluate it. You will learn to distinguish between good and bad arguments, and to articulate what features of an argument make it good or bad, better or worse.

You will learn how to apply these concepts to your essay writing.

You will also be introduced to some basic concepts that form the backbone of any academic discipline, such as: truth and falsity, rational and irrational beliefs, theory, method, proof and evidence.

The unit aims to:

• Introduce students to basic principles of argument;
• Enhance their ability to understand the structure of and critically evaluate other people's arguments, and to formulate and clearly articulate arguments of their own;
• Enhance their ability to avoid common argumentative faults, such as ambiguity, irrelevance, fallacies, and rhetorical ploys;
• Enhance their understanding of key basic concepts, like theory, fact, truth, belief, proof, and evidence.

One two-hour lecture and one one-hour tutorial per week.

Students should be able to:

• Identify and analyse the structure of arguments that appear in academic and non-academic texts, and in everyday conversation;
• Distinguish between evidence and conclusive proof, between belief and truth, and between rational and irrational belief;
• Articulate the fundamentals of the language of symbolic logic.

Students should be able to:

• Evaluate arguments and provide reasons for their evaluations;
• Identify common rhetorical ploys and avoid common fallacies;
• Apply principles of good reasoning in the formulation of valid arguments.

Students should be able to:

• Clearly communicate principles of formal and informal reasoning.

Essay (1500 words) 50%

Exam (1.5 hours) 50%

The School of Social Sciences (SoSS) is committed to providing timely and appropriate feedback to students on their academic progress and achievement, thereby enabling students to reflect on their progress and plan their academic and skills development effectively. Students are reminded that feedback is necessarily responsive: only when a student has done a certain amount of work and approaches us with it at the appropriate time is it possible for us to feed back on the student's work. The main forms of feedback on this course are written feedback responses to assessed essays and exam answers.

We also draw your attention to the variety of generic forms of feedback available to you on this as on all SoSS courses. These include: meeting the lecturer/tutor during their office hours; e-mailing questions to the lecturer/tutor; asking questions from the lecturer (before and after lecture); presenting a question on the discussion board on Canvas; and obtaining feedback from your peers during tutorials.

• Tracy Bowell & Gary Kemp, Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide (Routledge 2002)
• Diane F. Halpern and Dana S. Dunn, Thought and Knowledge: An Introduction to Critical Thinking (Routledge, 2022)
• Stella Cottrell, Critical Thinking Skills (Palgrave, 2011).
• Matthew Van Cleave, Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking (Open Textbook Library, 2016). https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/introduction-to-logic-and-critical-thinking
• Nicholas Capaldi and Miles Smit, The Art of Deception: An Introduction to Critical Thinking (Prometheus Books, 2007).