Critical Reasoning

Reason better when deciding what to believe and when deciding what to do. This course provides practical tools drawn from cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, logic, probability, and decision theory. We examine heuristics and biases—spontaneous judgments that can be predictably irrational—and study what good deductive, causal, and probabilistic reasoning looks like.

The goal is to develop effective reasoning skills with applications in personal and professional life: recognizing and constructing compelling arguments, assessing evidence, distinguishing correlation from causation, updating beliefs, and making decisions under uncertainty. The course is open to students from across the University.

My textbook, Reason Better: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Critical Thinking, grew out of this course.