Course materials

1. Goal: The goal this week is to use the tools we have assembled, as well as
a few
Goal: The goal this week is to use the tools we have assembled, as well as a few others, to
explore hypothetical and scientific reasoning as well as pseudoscience.Course
Objective(s):CO1: Develop a comprehensive vocabulary as it relates to the study of
logicCO5: Cultivate the tools of logic in the analysis of everyday reasoning about causation,
scientific reasoning and pseudoscienceDescription: Choose one of the 9 statements below
and invent at least three hypotheses aimed at explaining what went wrong or at solving the
problem. Then, for each hypothesis, describe one or more experiments or inquiries that
would confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis.Someone you have been dating has a birthday
coming up, so you call a florist and order flowers for the occasion. Two days later the person
is cold and distant.After settling in a new location you buy some seeds for a flower garden.
When the flowers come up, they are stunted and of poor quality.After paying off the balance
of a specific credit card, you go to make a small purchase and the card is declined.After
driving for miles on a dusty road, you park your car near the bank of a river and take a hike
through the woods. Soon you become lost. In one direction you see a small stream, and in
the other, a trail.A close friend calls you on the phone and confides a personal secret. That
night you write the secret in your journal. A few days later your friend is furious with you
because the friend overheard someone at work talking about the secret.On a rainy evening,
you return to your ground-floor apartment and discover that you have been burglarized.
You can’t believe it, because you are certain you locked the door when you went out. You
share the apartment with a roommate.You are a philosophy professor at a university, and
while reading a set of term papers you discover that two of them are identical. Those two
papers are also extremely well written.You are a manager of a department store, and,
although the business has been good lately, your chief accountant informs you that the store
is losing money.After spending a couple of hours writing a paper for a class, you upload a
paper to class. You check back in 20 minutes and the similarity report shows 100 %
similarity with something that was already posted once before.