SYLLABUS

PHILOSOPHY 105: CRITICAL THINKING

2024 Fall

Instructor: Lyle Crawford Office: WMC 5655 or Zoom

Email: LCRAWFOR@SFU.CA Office hours: Posted on Canvas
Lecture: Tue 12:30–14:20 (RCB Images Theatre)

TERM SCHEDULE

Week Lecture Tutorial

1 Sep 10 Units 1-2 NO TUTORIAL
2 Sep 17 Unit 2 Units 1-2
3 Sep 24 Unit 3 Unit 2
4 Oct 1 Unit 4-5 Unit 3
5 Oct 8 Unit 5 Units 4-5
6 Oct 15 NO CLASS NO TUTORIAL
7 Oct 22 Unit 6 Unit 5
8 Oct 29 EXAM 1 FLEX
9 Nov 5 Unit 7 Unit 6
10 Nov 12 Unit 7 Unit 7
11 Nov 19 Units 8-9 Unit 7
12 Nov 26 Units 9-10 Unit 8
13 Dec 3 Unit 10 Units 9-10
Exam Dec 5-17 EXAM 2
Period

Exam 1 Exam 2 Assignment 1 Assignment 2 iClicker Tutorial

Units 2-5 Units 6-10 Unit 3 Units 4-5 Units 2-10 Units 1-10
30% 35% 12% 13% 7% 3%

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 SYLLABUS CONTENTS

PHIL 105 Critical Thinking

Course Description and Learning Objectives
Info and Policies
1. Instructor Contact
2. Office Hours
3. Canvas
4. TAs and Tutorial
• Teaching Assistants
• Tutorial Purpose
• Tutorial Mark
• Tutorial Attendance
5. Course Manual and Class Slides
• Using the Course Manual
• Course Manual Print Version
• Slides Not Posted
6. iClicker (Student Response System)
• iClicker Mark
• Missed Classes
• Set-up Instructions
• Legal Notice
7. Exams
• Schedule
• Content and Format
• Exam Marking
• Missed Exams
• Final Exam Hardship
8. Academic Integrity
9. Grades
• Grading System
• Exam 1 Marks
• Further Explanation
• Assignment Resubmissions / Exam Retakes / Extra Credit Assignments
• Grade Boundaries and Bump-ups
10. References

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 COURSE DESCRIPTION

This is a course about how to think, and how to understand and evaluate what other people think. It won’t
tell you what to think. You won’t prepare for exams by memorizing lots of facts. Instead, you’ll develop
general skills for deciding what to believe and what to do. These are skills to use in any situation where
having true beliefs matters, because you just want to know what’s true or because actions guided by true
beliefs are the best way to achieve your goals. These are also skills for clear and effective communication.

Here’s an overview of what we’ll do in this course:

Arguments
An argument presents reasons to hold a belief. It’s an opportunity to learn from someone else, or to
discover that they have bad reasons for believing what they do. Skills for analyzing and evaluating
arguments allow us make use of them while minimizing the risk of being misled by them. Skills for
constructing and presenting arguments allow us to show others that we have our own good reasons for
belief.

Logic and Probability

Logic and probability include some of the most basic rules of good reasoning. They help us notice when
our beliefs should lead us to a new belief and when they conflict with one another. And they help us to see
how strongly we should hold a belief, crucial for making good decisions and for thinking well about risk
and reward.

Explanation and Confirmation

Explanation and confirmation are fundamental to the careful use of evidence, from science to law to
everyday life. Criteria by which to recognize better and worse explanations, and strong and weak
evidence, are key for this. And we must be able to recognize common errors and forms of bias, in other
people and in ourselves.

Data and Experiments

We often rely on limited data to learn about the world beyond our personal experience. We encounter it
every day in the form of the statistics. It’s often how we learn about the causal relationships we use to
control the world to our advantage, such as in medical and environmental science. To make use of this
data while minimizing the risk of being misled by it, we need to understand some basic statistical and
experimental procedures.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Read and reconstruct arguments.

• Construct valid deductive arguments and assess arguments for validity.
• Identify counterexamples and formulate logical objections.
• Analyze explanatory and confirmatory reasoning, evaluating hypothesis and evidence strength.
• Recognize and criticize common errors and forms of bias in the assessment of evidence.
• Apply rules of probability in simple quantitative problems and for hypothesis testing.
• Reconstruct and evaluate examples of reasoning by analogy.
• Explain the relevance of sample size and the problem of a biased sample.
• Evaluate causal reasoning in everyday and scientific (controlled experiment) contexts.
• Formulate and diagram causal explanations, recognizing confounding factors.

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 COURSE INFO AND POLICIES

1. INSTRUCTOR CONTACT

Please contact me directly at my SFU email (lcrawfor@sfu.ca). Include your course (PHIL 105) and your
preferred and registered names in your message. Feel free to call me Lyle.

2. OFFICE HOURS

I have both in-person and Zoom office hours. Information for both will be posted on Canvas.

3. CANVAS

Make sure you have access to Canvas. I use Canvas for:

• Office hours and contact info for me and the TAs

• Important files
• Announcements
• Assignment instructions and submissions
• Marks (Canvas gradebook) and grading info
• Recording and correcting errors in the course manual

4. TAs and TUTORIALS

Teaching Assistants

Tutorials are run by TAs, who are graduate students in the Department of Philosophy.

Tutorial Purpose

The purpose of tutorial is to help you practice and explore course concepts in a small group of fellow
learners. Normally the tutorial activities are based on material discussed the previous week in lecture, but
sometimes they are based on the present week’s lecture. Tutorial does not re-teach the lecture. It’s not
designed to enable you skip or ignore lecture.

The tutorial activities are coordinated and mostly designed by me. However your TA has some discretion
in choosing how to do the activities and how to use the tutorial time.

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Tutorial Mark

Tutorial counts for a small mark. This mark is mostly for participation/engagement. It’s not for giving
correct answers, but it’s not simply for showing up, either.

Tutorial Attendance

Normally you may attend only the tutorial in which you are enrolled. However if you cannot attend your
own tutorial for some reasonable reason one week, your TA may give you permission to attend one of
their other tutorials.

5. COURSE MANUAL and CLASS SLIDES

The course manual presents all and only the concepts and skills we’ll learn in this course, with definitions,
brief explanations, examples, and practice exams. It’s posted in Canvas as a PDF file (and set of files).

Using the Course Manual

The lectures are designed for you to be able to follow them without having read the course manual unit.
Nonetheless you can give yourself the best chance of understanding and benefitting from class by reading
the unit beforehand. The lecture is directly based on it.

Course Manual Print Version

I recommend Cornerstone Printing in the Cornerstone Building (8930 University High St., just past the bus
loop and Starbucks). I send the file to them at the beginning of the term. You can just ask them to print a
copy of the PHIL 105 course manual. They prepare a nice spiral bound version at a reasonable price.

Slides Not Posted

Sorry, I don’t post the slides that I use in class. The slides are teaching resources for lecture and tutorial.
They are not designed for private study. They are directly based on the course manual that you have.

6. iCLICKER (Student Response System)

See the iClicker module in Canvas for information and instructions on setting up iClicker.

iClicker Mark

Many iClicker questions are scored, however the mark is mostly a participation mark. iClicker responses
are worth 7% of the course mark; approximately 5 pts are for participation and 2 pts are for correct
responses. So take clicker questions seriously, but don't stress about them. Clicker questions in the first
week do not count for marks.

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Missed Clicks

Sorry, there is no fair and practical way for me to compensate people for, or have people make up, missed
clicks, even when they are missed for reasonable reasons (illness, technical glitches, etc.).

Since I cannot edit the iClicker score directly, compensating someone for a missed click requires that I
manually record a tiny bonus mark (which there’s no way to calculate until the end of the term when I
know how many iClicker questions we did that term) to cancel out the missed participation component of
the missed click. Since people can submit clicks from anywhere with an internet connection, if I’m being
diligent, I need to go through the iClicker logs and check that the clicks were in fact missed. With
hundreds of students in a class, there are hundreds of clicks missed for reasonable reasons in a term,
which would all have to be recorded from emails – for marks worth fractions of a percentage point.

I tried having this policy. The amount of time it consumes is completely out of proportion with the
significance of the marks involved. When I asked around, I couldn’t find any other instructor using iClicker
who did anything like this. I will give up on iClicker before ever doing this again. If I get too many
students aggrieved by the loss of iClicker marks, I will just stop using iClicker and shift those marks to the
exams. But I think iClicker has merit and I’m not ready to abandon it yet, even though it’s imperfect and
occasionally costs people small marks though no fault of their own. If you find this policy objectionable,
please let me know so that I can better judge whether to keep using iClicker.

An average class has clicks worth ~0.7% of your course mark. Technically you can open the app and click
from anywhere, including in bed at home. You would be blind guessing but most of the mark is for
participation anyway. Obviously this solution is dumb and defeats the purpose of using iClicker, but it’s all
I have. But again: a class is worth only ~0.7% in clicks. One or two missed classes are unlikely to affect
your grade.

Legal Notice

iClicker (Macmillan Learning) collects your personal information on behalf of SFU under the authority
of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, RSBC 1996, c. 165, section 26(c). The
information collected includes your name, contact information, course information, and your interactions
with iClicker. iClicker is used by SFU to facilitate engagement and interaction between the instructor and
students in the classroom, score student responses, and/or record student attendance. Macmillan
Learning's privacy policy is available here: https://store.macmillanlearning.com/us/privacy-notice.

If you have any questions about the collection and use of this information please contact the Centre for
Educational Excellence, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, 778.782.7115.

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7. EXAMS

Schedule

Exam 1 is in class. See the term schedule.

Exam 2 is in the final exam period. Its date and time are announced by SFU a month or so into the term.
Plans you make for the exam period are at your own risk. If you plan to leave town during the exam
period and our exam turns out to be later than that date, you will have to choose between your plan and
your exam. This class has hundreds of students. We cannot have a choose-your-own-exam-date system.

Content and Format

Exam 1 covers 2–5; Exam 2 covers 6-10. Unit 1 is background to both exams. Most exam questions are
based on the practice exams (not the Quick Test questions). Exam 2 is worth a bit more, covers a bit
more material, and has a longer writing time.

Missed Exams

Don’t miss an exam if you can possibly help it. But also: Don’t come to school if you have COVID. Contact
me as soon as possible if you think you are contagious or if you must miss an exam for some other reason
that may warrant academic concession. If you email me hours or days after the exam, I will be very
skeptical. Other than people who were kidnapped or in a coma, the only people who email me hours or
days after an exam are people who simply forgot there was exam that day and skipped class.

The Academic Concession Self-Declaration form is posted in Canvas. You’ll need to fill this out and submit
it. Normally academic concession means that you write a make-up exam about a week after the regular
exam. Since I usually have several of these to manage and there is no one in the Philosophy Department
to do this for me, normally I need to book a room and create time in my schedule to do this, and
sometimes travel to SFU for it. That means there is normally a single make-up exam. If you miss the
regular exam, this make-up exam is your one other opportunity to write the exam. (Extreme cases –
documented major illness or injury – are addressed on a case-by-case basis.)

There is a question of what to do with make-up exam marks. Post-COVID, the academic concession
system is very vulnerable to abuse. Someone tells me they feel sick and they get to reschedule their
exam. Regardless of whether the person is genuinely sick, they get significant extra time to prepare for
the exam, including by discussing it with other students. These problems convince me that offering
straight make-up exams for full marks is unfair to other students in the class. The best way I can see to
address this is to apply a small penalty (5-10%) to a make-up exam mark to moderately discourage
make-ups and to compensate for the advantage someone gets from writing later. The point is not to
punish people for getting sick and not to encourage people to come to school while contagious, but to try
to make the system as fair overall as I can. One thing that academic concession doesn’t mean is re-
weighting the exams. Each exam covers half the course. I can’t just give free marks on half the course.

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(More generally, “re-weighting the exams” isn’t really a thing. It’s a euphemism instructors invented to
avoid acknowledging what they’re really doing: giving free marks. The course is what it is, the
assessments are what they are, and you get the same credit as everyone else. When instructors pretend
to make the exam weights different for you, all they’re really doing is giving you a mark on the missed
exam that’s the same as you got on the other exam.)

Final Exam Hardship

SFU defines exam hardship as any of the following: 1) two exams scheduled at the same time or 2) three
exams within a 24 hour period. SFU’s exam scheduling system minimizes instances of exam hardship but
they can still happen. SFU’s policy is that, in order to be eligible for accommodation, a student “must
notify the instructor(s) and department one month prior to the exam date.” This will not be difficult to do,
as SFU publishes the exam schedule long before this deadline.

8. ACADEMIC INTEGRITY

Academic integrity means doing your own work, under the conditions and with the resources that are
authorized for everyone in the class. It means completing the exams and assignments yourself, or only
with whatever assistance (e.g. TA help in office hours) is permitted by the assignment instructions.
Obviously the two big issues here are 1) other people (friends, tutors, people on the internet, etc.), and 2)
generative AI tools. In the case of exams, the policy is quite simple: any use at all of other people or AI is
cheating. In the case of assignments, it is hopeless and pointless for me to totally ban either, but what
constitutes appropriate use of other people or AI is more difficult to nail down. The general answer is: use
of either must be minimal and at least one step removed from the construction of the main content and
form of what you submit. More details will be provided with assignment instructions.

Academic integrity is very important to me, to the Philosophy Department, to SFU, and I hope to you.
Policing it is never fun, but we will do that. Normally the minimum consequence of an academic integrity
violation is zero on the exam or assignment and a note in the student’s academic record. Subsequent
violations or more egregious violations may have greater penalties. If you are not sure about what
constitutes academic integrity in a particular case, do not just guess. Speak to me or your TA about it.

9. GRADES

Grading System

The Philosophy Department expects about half the students in a large 100-level course to get A-B grades.
This is an expectation, not a completely rigid policy. But if I submit a batch of grades with significantly
more (or less) than half the students getting A-B grades, I need to explain why to the Department Chair.

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“Are the grades curved?”

Technically no. Curving means there are predetermined quotas for how many students get A+, A, A-, B+,
etc. This course does not have that. (It’s possible for everyone to get an A or for everyone to get an F.)
However the Philosophy Department’s strong expectation that about half the students will get A-B grades
loosely functions like a curving system.

“So how does the course grading scheme actually work?”

Assuming that I judge that the overall performance of the class is not unusually good or bad, I set the
cut-off mark for a B- grade around the median (middle) mark in the list of all student marks. Then I divide
the range from that mark up to 100% into six equal ranges for the grades B-, B, B+, A-, A, and A+. Then
I set the cut-off mark for a D grade as low as I think is remotely reasonable (meaning that very few
people who finish the course fail) and divide the range from that mark up to the B- cut-off mark into four
equal ranges for the grades D, C-, C, and C+.

For example, suppose that the median mark in a class is 70.86%. If I think the class
performed normally, I might put the B- cut-off at 70%. The range from 70 to 100 is 30, and
30/6 is 5, so that means: 75 = B, 80 = B+, 85 = A-, 90 = A, 95 = A+. Then I think about
how hard the course was that term (Did I write extra hard exam questions? Were their
disruptions to lecture or tutorial? Etc.) and decide that it’s just reasonable to pass (D)
someone who scored 40%. The range from 40 to 70 is 30, and 30/4 is 7.5, so that means:
47.5 = C-, 55 = C, 62.5 = C+.

(In many grading schemes, the A+ mark range is larger than the A mark range. This compensates for
marking that makes it nearly impossible to get a perfect mark, e.g. because the instructor believes
“there’s no such thing as a perfect essay”. This does not apply in this course. It is completely possible to
get a perfect mark on every component of this course. So the A+ range is the same size as the A range.)

Exam 1

After Exam 1, I post a chart showing the approximate marks that would be required for A-, B-, C-, and D
grades. This is roughly what your grade would be if it were based on just Exam 1.

Further Comments

Question: Why is it like this? My other instructor uses a predetermined grading scheme (e.g. 72%
required for B, etc.).
Answer: Your other instructor does one of four things when they mark:
1) They directly grade student work and express the grades with numbers. This is easy to do with
things like essays. For example, they think your essay is worth a B+ so they just give it a mark
that converts to B+ in the predetermined scheme.

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 2) They don’t think about what grade student work should get and mechanically assign a grade
following the predetermined scheme. This is a failing on their part. It is their professional
responsibility to give grades they judge to be appropriate.
3) They design questions that perfectly produce the correct grade when marked with the grading
scheme. I cannot speak for every course, but in a course like this one, that would be extremely
difficult to do. There is no way to write the types of questions I use in this course in such a way
that I can be sure, before seeing how people do on the exams, that the grade value of every mark
comes out to what it should be when converted with a predetermined scheme.
4) They reserve the right to scale marks at the end of the term in order to produce appropriate grades
with the predetermined scheme. This is fine but pointless. To know how to scale the marks, an
instructor must know what grades the original marks should get after they’re scaled. But if they
know that, they should just set the grading scheme to produce those grades and skip the silly
exercise of scaling.

Assignment Resubmissions / Exam Retakes / Extra Credit Assignments

I am committed to fairness. That means that whatever opportunities I offer one student, I must offer to all
students. If I create an extra credit opportunity for one student just because they feel they could do
better, I must give that same opportunity to every student and make sure that they know about it.
Potentially hundreds of people could take me up on this offer. This creates a significant practical problem.
Aside from the time involved in creating new projects and exams for extra credit, every single hour of the
TAs’ contracts is already assigned to some regular component of teaching or marking.

A deeper problem is with grading. Because of the way this course is graded, people will have a legitimate
complaint if I create a surprise additional course component. Someone might have been fine with their
results but now feel they must do extra work to maintain their standing in the course. If extra credit work
is completed after grades are submitted, boosting someone’s grade, I might even have to lower someone
else’s grade after the term is over. You can imagine the emails I will receive if I start doing that.

The best I can do is create a course with multiple ways and opportunities for people to demonstrate
mastery of the course material, and to give adequate opportunities to prepare for and complete these
things. The grounds for academic concession must be very limited and can’t include you believing that you
could do better. I’m sorry.

Grade Boundaries and Bump-ups

In a small class it's sometimes feasible to work out grade boundaries such that no one just misses a grade
by a fraction of a mark. In a large class (hundreds of students) such as ours, there is no way to do this.
No matter where grade boundaries go, there will be people who just miss a grade. I sometimes get emails
from understandably upset students who’ve missed a grade by 0.01 marks – so aggravating!

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If you just miss a grade, it may seem reasonable to ask me to bump you up to the next grade, perhaps
justifying it by saying that you improved or that you missed a clicker question due to some trivial issue or
that an exam answer might be worth an extra point or two, etc. The problem is that this same sort of
consideration will apply to many other students as well. To be fair, I will have to do this for everyone who
just missed a grade by whatever small amount, e.g. 0.35 or whatever seems the threshold for severe
aggravation. Then I'll have a procedure that involves first determining grade boundaries, then going in
and monkeying with dozens of students' marks that are 0.35 below those boundaries so that no one just
misses a grade. But that just means that the real grade boundary is the set boundary minus 0.35. And as
soon as people realize that's how grading works, someone with a mark that is 0.36 below the boundary
(0.01 below the real boundary) will email me and the whole process will start over. There has to be a cut-
off somewhere. I’m sorry.

10. REFERENCES

Very rarely am I in a position to be able to write a useful reference letter for a student who’s taken PHIL
105 with me. I have done this in only a few cases for people I’d gotten to know quite well through office
hours and other conversations. Under normal circumstances, when a student has simply done well in the
course, there is just nothing of any substance that I’m able say about them for a reference. About all I
could say is something like “This is a serious course in which an A grade actually means something, and
this student earned a ____ grade”, and then describe the course. This is not a reference. Being a referee
means that I can describe you, not just the course. Even your TA is in a better position to provide a
reference than I am.

Some programs for which students seek references don’t initially ask for comments and may never ask for
any. This does not get around the problem. If I agree to put my name in as an academic referee, I am
implicitly stating that I am able to provide a meaningfully personalized endorsement of the applicant,
which is exactly what I am almost never able to do for PHIL 105 students.

An academic reference normally should come from someone who knows you from interaction in a low-
enrollment course in which you completed some significant project. I realize that can be a challenge for
students seeking references early in their university career when most or all of their courses have been
high-enrollment with little or no direct interaction with the instructor. I completely recognize that this is a
frustrating and possibly unfair situation that you find yourself in. I wish that schools and programs would
not ask for something that even very worthy applicants (or their instructors) normally cannot provide.

In summary: I am not willing to make up things about you that I don’t know or to submit my name in a
way that implies that I would be able to provide a real, personalized reference for you if asked unless I
actually know you fairly well. I may be willing to provide a generic statement of the sort described above if
there is a way for me to do that and if you think that this is valuable to you.

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