Canterbury University will next year be offering a Stage I course on critical thinking, to be called Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus. Named after a classic book by Martin Gardner, the course, Philosophy 110, will be headed by founding member of the NZ Skeptics, Denis Dutton. Prof Dutton says it will fulfill a demand for a sharp, smart course in critical thinking from a standpoint quite different from that offered by traditional logic and philosophy.
“It will make use of recent research into the reasons why human thought is prone to specific patterns of fallacious analysis. It is a course in the spirit of the Philosophy Programme’s most illustrious and redoubtable member: Sir Karl Popper. In fact, part of the course centres on his ideas about the nature of science,” Prof Dutton says.
The course aims to introduce students to the structure of scientific thinking both through an historical/analytical survey and by contrasting it with varieties of pseudoscientific and irrational ways of thinking. In fulfilling this mission, the course proposes to:
- review the history of science from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century through to the advent of Darwinian biology;
- give students a grasp of the philosophical thinking that developed alongside the growth of science in the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries;
- present the contrasting philosophies of science of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper as marking an important intellectual divide in thinking about science;
- show how legitimate science and scientific explanations differ in kind from bogus attempts to ape science and parasitically acquire its power and prestige;
- familiarise students with the fallacies and traps, both logical and psychological, that bedevil both ordinary and apparently scientific reasoning.
