Arguments Module

This is the Arguments Module that I use when teaching Phil 166: Current Moral and Social Issues at USC. Each of the following is a PlayPosit bulb, which embeds active learning questions into the animated instructional videos that can be found here without the embedded questions.

My goal in this tutorial is not to teach students logic, but to give them a little bit of understanding of why we criticize arguments in the way that we do, enough to go in to evaluate most arguments in an introductory philosophy class in form of a loose and informal understanding of modus ponens, an imperfect but helpful fallback to use when arguments take other forms, a fool-proof way to reconstruct arguments from a passage without rendering them formally invalid, and the idea that we need to always think about how arguments can be fixed and improved.

To view these videos with their embedded questions, you will need to login with a student PlayPosit account - if you do not have one, they are free to set up and only require an e-mail address.

If you use PlayPosit as an instructor, all of these bulbs are public and you can use them to record scores for your own students - I have them all set to allow infinite re-takes because my goal is for all students to master the material rather than to evaluate their grasp of it at any time slice.

1 Arguments: Key Concepts

2 Formal Validity

3 Conditionals

4 Compound Arguments

5 Criticizing Arguments

6 Reconstructing Arguments

7 Reconstructing Compound Arguments

8 Fixing Arguments