New course on critical thinking for 2007

- 1st November 2006

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: