Class notes - September 18, 2007

  1. Review value assumptions.
  2. Impediments to critical thinking
    1. News media - What makes news news?  (Learning to Think Things Through) pag 19.
    2. Forming a Picture of the world from movies, tv, advertising!!, magazines and other media (music).
    3. All or Nothing Thinking or Black and White thinking.  
    4. Fear - making mistakes, standing out, believing something different than others, expressing difference of opinion.
    5. Educational practices - student's role is as a passive recepticle of knowledge.
    6. Egocentrism - we are made up of a series of our own experiences
    7. Developmental stages - we learn to believe in patterns shaped by our growth, at some point we can begin to take control of our own beliefs.
    8. Emotion - How many people believe that we should use embryos to carry out stem cell research?  How many people believe that we should not use embryos?
    9. If you are emotionally invested in a particular stance, it will be very hard to apply critical thinking skills to those opposing your view.
      1. But...if you can look dispassionately at their arguments, you may either find some common ground or...
      2. You may find ammunition that you can use to carry out your own debate.  Knowledge is power.
  3. Assumptions in general
    1. Underlie many arguments
    2. Help to move the argument along
    3. May be stated, but are usually unstated.
    4. Reflect either values that underlie the case or assumptions about how the world works.
  4. Descriptive assumptions
    1. Book passage 3
    2. Stem cell articles
    3. Focus on those assumptions that are necessary to the supporting arguments.
    4. They describe a condition that must be met in order to accept the argument.
    5. They support the argument and to take another side breaks down the argument.
  5. Quality of the evidence
    1. Some arguments are better at convincing us than others.
    2. Why is this?  
    3. Evidence - explicit information shared by the communicator that is used to back up or to justify the dependability of a factual claim.
    4. Kinds of evidence
      1. intuition
      2. personal experience
      3. testimonials
      4. appeals to authorities
      5. personal observation
      6. case examples
      7. research studies 
      8. surveys
      9. analogies
      10. and others...
    5. What is found in our stem cell articles.