Welcome to the Critical Thinker ACADEMY!
Below you’ll find links to the tutorial courses that are currently available on the site. Clicking a title link will take you to the table of contents for that course.
Non-members can preview a selection of videos in each course. Members have access to all of the videos on the site. How do I become a member?
Want to know what I’ve been working on recently? Check the Recent Site Updates page.
The total viewing time of the video content in the Academy is currently over 12 HOURS, and new tutorials are added every month. This site is a constant work in progress!
This page is pretty long. To minimize scrolling and to help you find what you’re looking for, here’s a handy index to the course descriptions below. Clicking a link in the index will take you to the course link and description.
Critical Thinker Podcast Videos
1. Why Critical Thinking Matters
2. The Five Pillars of Critical Thinking
3. Special Topics
Courses for Developing Analytical Thinking Skills
1. Basic Concepts in Logic and Argumentation
2. Basic Concepts in Propositional Logic
3. Common Valid and Invalid Argument Forms
4. Fallacies
Courses for Developing Essay Writing Skills
1. How to Write a Good Argumentative Essay
2. How to Cite Sources and Avoid Plagiarism
Courses on Reasoning About Risk and Uncertainty
1. What is Probability?
2. The Rules for Reasoning with Probabilities
3. Fallacies of Probabilistic Reasoning
Note: this list will continue to grow to include courses on:
- moral reasoning and argumentation
- analyzing and diagramming complex arguments
- elementary decision and game theory
- cognitive biases and the psychology of persuasion
- critical thinking about science and pseudoscience
- and many more!
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Critical Thinker Podcast Video Courses
These courses are different from the others in the Academy. They’re collected from video podcasts from The Critical Thinker Podcast that I produce. The videos in the other tutorial courses you see on this page were made specifically for the Academy and are not available anywhere else.
1. Why Critical Thinking Matters
Total Viewing Time: 35 minutes
Click the course title to view the table of contents.
In this course I’ve collected the first group of video podcast episodes that address the question “why does critical thinking matter?”.
2. The Five Pillars of Critical Thinking
Total Viewing Time: 2 hours 05 minutes
Click the course title to view the table of contents.
The Critical Thinker Podcast is a platform where I explore what it means to be an independent critical thinker. The content in the podcast varies from episode to episode, but it’s organized around the idea that there are five principle components, or “pillars”, of critical thinking, and that all of these components need to be developed and brought to bear when reasoning about specific topics and when attempting to persuade through argumentation. These five pillars include LOGIC, ARGUMENTATION, RHETORIC, BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE, and ATTITUDES AND VALUES.
In this course I’ve collected the video podcast episodes that introduce and discuss each of the five components listed above, in roughly that order.
The last three episodes focus on a particular aspect of background knowledge that is very important for critical thinking; namely, background knowledge about cognitive biases and the way human beings actually form beliefs and make decisions.
3. Special Topics
Total Viewing Time: 1 hour
Click the course title to view the table of contents.
On the podcast I occasionally devote an episode to a question or an issue inspired by a listener email. These videos can be hard to categorize, so I figured I’d just put them here under “special topics”.
In this collection I have videos on …
- 5 Reasons to Major in Philosophy
- If the Brain is a Computer, Does That Mean it Was Designed?
- Causation, God and the Big Bang
Courses for Developing Analytical Thinking Skills
1. Basic Concepts in Logic and Argumentation
Total Viewing Time: 1 hour
Click the course title to view the table of contents.
This is where every course in critical thinking begins, with a discussion of the most basic and foundational concepts necessary for argument analysis. What is an argument? What is a premise? What is a conclusion? What is a good argument? What is a bad argument?
This course also introduces the single most important distinction in argument analysis, the distinction between the truth or falsity of the premises of an argument, and the logical relationship between the premises and the conclusion. It can be a tricky concept to master.
The last section discusses two important types of argument, “deductive” and “inductive”, and how they relate to scientific reasoning.
2. Basic Concepts in Propositional Logic
Total Viewing Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
Click the course title to view the table of contents.
You can’t get very far in argument analysis without learning some basic concepts of propositional (also known as “sentential”) logic. In this course I review these basic concepts, but I don’t spend time working out formal proofs in propositional logic (as you would in a course in symbolic logic). My interest here is in presenting and explaining those concepts that are needed for doing ordinary, everyday argument analysis, and in particular those concepts that are used in discussions of formal and informal fallacies. Fallacies are a fun topic and a student favorite, but many fallacies can only be understood if you first understand these basic concepts of propositional logic.
I should point out that if there is one skill that is essential to master for the LSAT (the Law School Admission Test), it’s the ability to reason with conditionals (statements of the form “If A then B”). This topic is covered thoroughly in Part 4 of this course.
3. Common Valid and Invalid Argument Forms
Total Viewing Time: 30 minutes
Click the course title to view the table of contents.
This course introduces some of the most common argument forms that use premises of the form “A or B”, “If A then B”, “All A are B” and “Some A are B”. These types of claims are introduced and discussed in the “Basic Concepts in Propositional Logic” course, and I strongly recommend you at least have access to those tutorials when going through this material.
Our goal as critical thinkers is to be able to recognize these argument forms when they appear in ordinary language, and know which forms are valid and invalid (note: the distinction between valid and invalid arguments is discussed at length in the “Basic Concepts in Logic and Argumentation” course). These forms have been studied and taught for centuries (hence the prevalence of Latin names like “modus ponens”).
4. Fallacies
Total Viewing Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
Click the course title to view the table of contents.
Students love learning to recognize fallacies and faulty reasoning. There’s just something empowering about it, I think.
There is a small industry devoted to identifying and classifying fallacies of reasoning. A comprehensive list of recognized fallacies would run into the hundreds. This course introduces the concept of a fallacy and discusses some common fallacy types, but it in no way aims to be comprehensive. Instead the focus is on how any given fallacy can be understood using the basic concepts of argument analysis introduced in earlier courses. The only classification I use distinguishes logical or formal fallacies, fallacies that arise from false or implausible premises, and fallacies that are best understood as violations of one of the necessary conditions for having a rational argument at all.
Courses for Developing Essay Writing Skills
1. How to Write a Good Argumentative Essay
Total Viewing Time: 1 hour
Click the course title to view the table of contents.
It’s a sad fact that fewer and fewer students are exposed to basic principles of essay composition, and even fewer are exposed to principles of argumentative (or persuasive) essay writing. In this tutorial course I present the key concepts of argumentative essay writing that I teach my own philosophy students. Part 1 covers basic guidelines for how to organize an argumentative essay. In Part 2 I use these guidelines to analyze, evaluate and rewrite a sample student essay.
These tutorials make use of concepts and techniques developed in my “Basic Concepts in Logic and Argumentation” course, and I recommend that they be viewed after exposure to that material, but they can also be profitably viewed on their own.
2. How to Cite Sources and Avoid Plagiarism
Total Viewing Time: 30 minutes
Click the course title to view the table of contents.
Students are told that they need to cite their sources in order to avoid plagiarism. But many students are confused about what counts as plagiarism, and very few are taught the basic principles of how to cite sources.
These tutorials review the basic definition of plagiarism, give examples of different forms of plagiarism, and introduces basic guidelines for how and when to cite sources. It concludes with an introduction to the most common citation styles that are used in academic writing.
Courses on Reasoning About Risk and Uncertainty
1. What is Probability?
Total Viewing Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
Click the course title to view the table of contents.
“But for us, probability is the very guide of life.” (Bishop Joseph Butler)
Probability concepts are important in everyday reasoning about chance and uncertainty, in the formal methods of inductive logic and scientific reasoning, and in philosophical arguments of many different kinds.
This course focuses on the MEANING of probability, how to understand the different things that people mean, or what scientists or mathematicians mean, when they use expressions like “the odds of getting a 2 on a dice roll is 1/6″, or “the probability of precipitation is 60%”, or “the probability of the atom decaying in one hour is 50%”.
There are, in fact, several different views of how such language should be interpreted. Becoming familiar with these views will help you to think more clearly and critically about situations where probability concepts arise.
2. The Rules for Reasoning With Probabilities
Click the course title to view the table of contents. (This course is in development)
In the tutorial course on different interpretations of the probability concept I often referred to the “probability calculus”, or the “mathematical theory of probability”. This is what most people are talking about when they refer to “probability theory”. Probability theory provides basic rules for reasoning with probabilities. Given probabilities for events A and B, we can calculate the probability of “A and B”, “A or B”, “A given B”, and so on.
These rules are part of our modern understanding of how we ought to reason about uncertainty. In this respect they function in a way similar to the rules of deductive propositional logic, which tell us how we ought to reason with truth-preserving inferences that involve conjunctions, disjunctions, conditionals, etc.
Critical thinking literacy requires that we be at least somewhat familiar with probabilistic relationships (like, we should all know that the probability of two events both occurring is always smaller than the probability of either event occuring separately). More importantly, the fallacies of probabilistic reasoning that we’ll be looking at in the next course can only be understood in relation to these basic rules.
Working through simple problems is a fun way to learn the basic concepts (and some concepts can only be grasped by working through examples) but critical thinking doesn’t require that we become probability theory masters!
3. Fallacies of Probabilistic Reasoning
In development
