Overview

“Think Again II: How to Reason Deductively” is the second in a series of four short courses that teach simple but vital rules to follow in thinking about any topic at all and common and tempting mistakes to avoid in reasoning. The courses discuss how to identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments by other people (including politicians, used car salesmen, and teachers) and how to construct arguments in order to help you decide what to believe or what to do.

In this course, you will learn how to evaluate deductive arguments for validity. In particular, you will learn new ways of representing the information that is contained in the premises of a deductive argument. Using these new representational devices (devices that we call “truth tables” and “Venn diagrams”), we will be able to apply rules to determine whether or not a particular deductive argument is valid.