Syllabus

Philosophy 12: Logic and Decision making

Fall 2006

MWF 11 – 11:50 Center 115

Instructor: Sharon Skare

Email: sharon@mind.ucsd.edu

Office:  HSS 8073

Office Hours:  Fri 9 – 11 a.m. or by appointment

Teaching Assistants:

Tarun Menon Email:  tmenon@ucsd.edu Office Hours: to be announced

Justin Knoepfler Email: jknoepfl@ucsd.edu Office Hours : to be announced

Course Description:

Reasoning and decision making are two of the most important activities in which humans engage. But we don’t always do so is the best manner. When we don’t, the consequences can range from minor inconvenience to catastrophic loss. One of the contexts in which humans have best developed their capacities for good reasoning and decision making is scientific inquiry. Hence, that is where we will turn for guidance. Science is also extremely important to our own decision making as we rely on the results of scientific inquiry. This requires, though, that we understand how science works and be able to assess whether a given result is trustworthy.

Some of the questions we will address are: (1) What makes for a good piece of reasoning in science? (2) Can you ever be absolutely certain of the truth or falsity of a scientific hypothesis? (3) How objective is observation and how can humans avoid making mistakes in perception? (4) What might we learn by systematic observation? (5) What can we learn from discovering correlations between variables and how can we avoid being misled by illusory correlations? (6) What does it take to establish a causal relationship?

This course will emphasize active engagement in the kinds of reasoning and decision making which scientists use in testing hypotheses, especially through on-line exercises and demonstrations. The goals of the course are for students to understand the logical and statistical principles by which scientific claims are created and evaluated and to develop a critical appreciation for the methods by which knowledge is acquired in science. You should leave this course with a better ability to distinguish good from poor reasoning and decision making in science and other domains.

Required Course Material:

Course materials are on the course website at http://inquiry.ucsd.edu. Login directions and initial login codes are included in the course reader, available at the UCSD bookstore. The modules found on the website include text, animation, and interactive exercises, of which only the text is included in the reader. Some modules have questions to answer at the end. All activity on the site is recorded and logged, and instructors have access to these records. Completion of exercises and question sets on the website will not be directly required, however the formulation of questions posed on quizzes, writing assignments, the midterm, and the final will draw heavily from the exercises and question sets on the website (as well as from lecture discussions), so it is in your interest to routinely do the exercises on the website when reading and studying for the class.   I recommend that you plan carefully how much time you will need to schedule at a computer with internet access in order to get through the reading and the exercises each week, and in order to research and write your course assignments.

The course is divided into 5 broad topics:  Argumentation, Observation, Correlation, Causation, and Mechanism. Within each topic I will focus on key concepts and let you know what these are in lecture.  These are the ideas you should try to understand fluently and be able to explain in your own words and relate to other concepts in the class.  With respect to specific experiments discussed on the website, I will likely utilize these examples on tests and quizzes, if I need examples to frame questions around, so you should be generally familiar with them.

I am scheduling 2 lecture sessions that will not be directly based on the website modules:  One lecture dedicated to different  kinds of experimental confounds and how researchers try to deal with them, and one lecture dedicated to Hume’s skepticism about inductive reasoning.  I will likely provide supplemental reading material related to these lectures via handouts distributed prior to the lecture.  You will be also responsible for this material.

Tentative Course Schedule

Date	Day	Events	Lecture Topic/Modules
9/25	Mon		Argumentation: "Invitation to scientific reasoning" through "Contingent statements"
9/27	Wed		Argumentation: "Justification and arguments" through "Conditional arguments continued"
9/29	Fri		Argumentation: "Evidential relations" through "A clear case of falsification"
10/2	Mon	Thought paper 1 due	Argumentation Review
10/4	Wed	Quiz1	Observation: "Observation and learning to see" through "Golgi stain and golgi apparatus"
10/6	Fri	Comments on thought paper 1 due	Observation: "Categories and taxonomy" through "Observational research on daily life activities"
10/9	Mon		Observation: "Variables and measurement" through "Variance and standard deviation"
10/11	Wed		Observation: "Populations and samples" through "Sampling binary values"
10/13	Fri		Correlation: "Predicting relationships between variables" through "Scatterplots"
10/16	Mon	Thought paper 2 due	Correlation: "Correlation coefficients" through "Coincidences"
10/18	Wed		Review for Midterm
10/20	Fri	Midterm
10/23	Mon	Comments on thought paper 2 due	Correlation: "When variables are not correlated" through "Combining probabilities"
10/25	Wed		Correlation: "When groups differ" through "Testing differences between sample means"
10/27	Fri		Correlation: "Determining whether differences are statistically significant" through "Danger: ‘regression to the mean’"
10/30	Mon	Thought paper 3 due	Correlation: "Correlational studies as tests of causal claims" through "The logic of research"
11/1	Wed		Hume on induction (supplemental reading may be provided in hardcopy form – not on website).  Introduction to Causation module.
11/3	Fri	Comments on thought paper 3 due	Causation: "Causal explanation" through "Necessary and sufficient causes"
11/6	Mon	Writing Assignment Due	Causation: "Why necessary and sufficient causes are rare" through "Causal overdetermination"
11/8	Wed		Causation: "Reasoning about causation" through "Playing with causal graphs"
11/10	Fri	Holiday
11/13	Mon	Thought paper 4 due	Causation Review Part 1
11/15	Wed		Causation: "Testing causal claims experimentally" through "Controlling for confounding variables"
11/17	Fri	Comments on thought paper 4 due	Causation: "Example experiments" through "Falsely linking xyy and violence"
11/20	Mon		Confounds (supplemental reading may be provided in hardcopy form – not on website)
11/22	Wed	Quiz2	Mechanism: "Entities and activities organized to produce a phenomenon" through "A memory example"
11/24	Fri	Holiday
11/27	Mon	Thought paper 5 due	Mechanism: "Describing and portraying mechanisms" through "Continental drift before tectonic plate mechanism"
11/29	Wed		Review for Final
12/1	Fri	Comments on thought paper 5 due	Review for Final
12/4	Mon	Final 11:30-2:30	Final

Course Requirements: 

Item	Points Available
Quiz 1	50
Quiz 2	50
Writing Assignment	200
Midterm	250
Final	350
Participation*	100
Total	1000

*(thought papers [5 total] will count as part of participation credit)

Letter grades will not be assigned until after all points are in. The worst-case scenario is that it will be a straight 10% breakdown: 90%-100% will be A-, A or A+; 80%-89.9% will be B-, B or B+; and so forth. So if you need to get a C-, for example, you should plan on getting at least 700 points out of the 1000 possible. Depending on the class average, the grade cut-offs may be curved downward a bit -- for example the A- cut-off could be 880 points rather than 900. But you should not count on any such curving down. The grade cut-offs will not be curved up, however, meaning that the straight 10% breakdown is the highest that the grade cut-offs will be set. See handout "Grading Criteria for Written Work" for more specific guidance on standards for different letter grades on writing assignments and essay portions of exams.

Score Sheets will be provided to you in section once or twice during the quarter, providing your scores on each class assignment thus far. Participation scores will not be finalized until the end of the quarter. Scores will be listed by a coded version of your student ID number in order to protect privacy, as per University regulations. I recommend that you retain copies of ALL your graded work until grades are processed in Tritonlink, alert your TA if you do not receive your graded work back at the same time as everyone else, and verify your scores during the quarter against the score sheets, to ensure that any manual errors have been corrected.

Exams.  The midterm and final will be comprehensive. Tests will consist of a mix of multiple choice, short answer, and essay questions.  For the multiple choice and short answer portion of the exams, examples of questions similar to, but not the same as, what will appear on the tests will be provided approximately a week in advance. We will aim to construct tests so that the questions will have varying degrees of difficulty, and will draw from the website modules and exercises as well as from lecture.  For the essay portion of the exams, a number of possible questions will be provided in advance, a subset of these questions will appear on the exam, and you will be required to choose a subset of the questions on the exam to answer. Graded exams and assignments will be returned within approximately 2 weeks.

No make-up quizzes or exams will be given. If you miss a quiz or the midterm for a legitimate reason, such as serious medical injury or illness, then the points will be made up in the following way: The final exam will have sections that correspond to material on each of the previous quizzes and exams. If a student misses a quiz or midterm for a legitimate reason, then the points that the student earns on the section of the final that corresponds will be used to fill in for the missing score. Legitimate reasons include serious illness with a doctor's note. Personal travel plans that conflict with the schedule, forgetting about the quiz or exam, etc., will not be considered legitimate reasons.

In order to help accommodate students with scheduling issues, an early version of the final will be given, usually 4 - 7 days before the normally scheduled exam, depending on the final exam schedule. Exact place and time will be announced in class.

No notes or books or other materials are allowed during the exams. You will need only one or more blue books, and one or more writing implements. The exam will have a sheet for recording your multiple choice answers. All work, and solutions to problems that are not multiple choice, must be written in the blue books. The exam should be placed inside the blue book and turned in with it when you turn your exam in.

Writing Assignment. A 3-4 page formal essay will be due Monday Nov. 6.  Paper topics will be provided on Monday, Oct. 23.  The topic may differ depending on which discussion section you are in (so, you should make sure that the topic you write about is the topic assigned to your particular discussion section time). Word process all papers, staple the pages of your paper together, at the upper left corner (no paper clips, no folded corners). Provide your name, course, date and word count in upper right corner of first page. Cite all sources (see "Academic Honesty" below). If you cite only the course website, then simply cite your source by the module name. Cite Web sites with full URL and date of most recent access.

Academic Honesty. All work must be your own. Plagiarism is the unacknowledged use of another person’s writing or of his or her words, ideas or facts. It is a serious violation of the standards of academic integrity. Plagiarism includes

• The verbatim repetition, without acknowledgment, of the writings of another author. All significant phrases, clauses, or passages, taken directly from source material must be enclosed in quotation marks and acknowledged either in the text itself or in footnotes.
• Borrowing without acknowledging the source.
• Paraphrasing the thoughts of another writer without acknowledgment.
• Allowing any other person or organization to prepare work for which one then submits as his/her own.

Thought papers.  These will be assigned every other week, beginning Week 2.  You will be responsible for writing a 1 to 2-page paper and bringing it with you to lecture on Monday of that week.  You will exchange papers with a fellow student on Monday, and then you will be responsible for reading the other student’s paper, and providing written feedback on that paper, due in lecture on Friday (or the following Monday if there is a holiday that Friday).  The papers with feedback will be turned in to the TAs for grading, and then the papers will be returned to the original author in section the following week.  You will be given credit both for your initial paper (2/3 of the credit) and for the quality of your response to another student’s paper (1/3 of the credit).  Grades will be based on effort and apparent understanding of the material, on a scale of 1-4 (1 =needs improvement, 2-3 = ok to very good, 4=outstanding/exceptionally good).  Both steps must be completed in order to get credit for either part of the assignment.  More detailed instructions and tips will be provided separately.

Lateness.  Any late assignment (Writing Assignments, thought papers) may be penalized by a grade level for each weekday it is late.  If you turn in an assignment late it is your responsibility to double check that the TA has received it and graded it with the rest of the assignments.

 

Participation.  Participation credit will take the following items into account:

• class and discussion section etiquette
• effort on the thought papers
• lecture and section attendance and participation
• completion of website modules and question sets (not strictly required, but may be considered as part of participation credit if needed)

If you miss something that goes toward participation credit (such as a group project conducted in section, a thought paper or an absence), try to do extra well on other things to compensate (speak up more in section, talk to the TA in office hours, make an extra effort on your next thought paper), rather than asking for an excused absence. In general, we will not excuse missed attendance or assignments, because it is too time consuming for the TAs to keep track of this for each student.  We won’t have participation credit tabulated until the end of the quarter, so we likely won’t have an estimate of your grade on this item until then.

Class Etiquette.  Please be polite and respectful of your fellow students and the TAs, in discussion and via email.  When emailing the instructor or TA, please identify the course title in the email subject line (e.g. "Phil 12 question about X"), be polite and grammatical in your email text, and allow a couple of days for a response.  Please be on time, don’t distract the instructor or other students with undue noise or other distractions during class.  Please make an appointment with the instructor or TA if you have an issue or problem to discuss.  If you miss a class, it is your responsibility to find a fellow student to assist you in catching up with lecture material that may have been missed. Please try to keep your sense of humor as you learn, since frustration inhibits the learning process.  Above all, please try to have fun with the material, maintain a good attitude and enjoy yourself!