Overview

“Think Again III: How to Reason Inductively” is the third 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.

Want to solve a murder mystery? What caused your computer to fail? Who can you trust in your everyday life? In this course, you will learn what distinguishes inductive arguments from deductive arguments and then how to analyze and assess five common forms of inductive arguments: generalizations from samples, applications of generalizations, inference to the best explanation, arguments from analogy, and causal reasoning. The course closes by showing how probability can be used to help us make decisions of all sorts.