Professor J. Keeping
keepling@yorku.ca

Office Hours:

4:30-5:30PM Thursdays (not including Reading Week) or by appointment

Office hours will be held IN-PERSON at Founders 318, but you can attend over Zoom

This is a skills-based course focusing on critical thinking, research-based writing, and qualitative and quantitative analysis. The particular focus will be on different positions taken within the social sciences on issues such as abortion, euthanasia, pornography, immigration etc. Typical examples are to be analyzed. Course credit exclusions: AP/MODR 1760 6.00, AP/MODR 1770 6.00.

This course is fully online and accessed through eClass. Both lectures and tutorials will be asynchronous (prerecorded) and accessed through links posted to the course eClass page. Weekly readings and assignments will also be accessed through eClass. YOU DO NOT NEED TO BUY A TEXTBOOK; ALL READINGS WILL BE IN THE FORM OF LINKS OR PDFS FOUND UNDER THE CORRESPONDING WEEK ON THE ECLASS PAGE.

Your primary means of contact with your instructors is through the online forum on our eClass page. There is one forum for each tutorial group. This will function as a space to ask questions, interact with other students in your tutorial, and do assigned activities that contribute to the participation portion of your grade. Your tutorial leader will monitor and moderate the forum. If you need to contact the course director, please do so through email. Do not use eClass’s internal instant messaging function.

Fallacy Test (Nov. 26)                                                              15%

Argument Reconstruction Assignment (Nov. 3)                          5%

Convergent Argument Analysis (Jan. 19)                                   5%

Critical Essay (Feb. 23)                                                             20%

Argumentative Essay (Mar. 30)                                                 30%

Participation (Weekly)                                                              10%

Assignments & Exercises (Weekly-ish)                                     15%

Participation will be based mainly on your contributions (posts and responses) in the online forum for your tutorial group. There will be weekly questions and activities posted to the forum, but any participation, such as asking any questions you may have, or responding to questions and posts by other students, will also normally count towards your participation grade. Relevant activities outside the forums may also be counted towards your participation grade, if they are not part of any other graded component of the course, and if they are pre-arranged with your tutorial leader.

Assignments & Exercises: Most weeks homework will be assigned practicing the skills covered in class. These will be worth 2% each, for a total of 20%. The graded component for assignments and exercises, however, is 15%. This means you can get up to 20/15 on this component, raising your overall grade. Alternatively, this allows you to miss two of these small assignments and still get the full 15% for this component.

Argument Reconstruction Assignment and Convergent Argument Analysis are homework assignments that are worth 5% each instead of being folded into the Assignments and Exercises part of your grade. They have their own graded components because they require a little more work than most of the weekly assignments, and because we want to make sure you do them. But like the regular weekly(ish) assignments, they involve practicing specific skills and techniques demonstrated in lecture.

The Fallacy Test will be written online through eClass on November 26-27. The test window will be open for 24 hours, beginning at 7pm on November 26. You will have 60 minutes to complete the test once you start it. There will be a practice test the previous week so that you can master the interface before writing the actual test.

Essays: This course uses Turnitin, a plagiarism-detecting service. Essays are submitted electronically, via the link provided in eClass. Late papers will only be accepted without penalty in the event of a documented emergency or prior agreement with your tutorial leader. All other work will be penalized at a rate of 5% per day, up to a maximum of five days (25%). After that, the essay will not be accepted.

Note: You are expected to write your essays yourself, without technological assistance. Use of text generation applications, such as ChatGPT, is forbidden. ChatGPT and similar applications, although branded as AI (artificial intelligence), are not actually intelligent. All that they do is create text that appears to have been written by a person. Text generated by ChatGPT is known to contain mistakes and falsehoods, and to cite sources that do not exist. For a good explanation of what the applications now being marketed as “AI” actually are, and why consumers are being misled about them, click here. And for an entertaining real-life story of a lawyer who ruined his career by using ChatGPT, click here.

SCHEDULE OF LECTURES AND TOPICS:

1. Week of Sept. 1: Introduction: Going Sane in a Crazy World

2. Week of Sept. 8: Introduction to Critical Reading

Reading: “Reading Arguments” on eClass.

3. Week of Sept. 15: Understanding Texts as Arguments

Reading: “What Are the Reasons?” on eClass.

Assignment: Critical Reading Assignment #1.

4. Week of Sept. 22: The Argument That Wasn’t There: Visual Arguments & Slogans

Reading: “Analyzing Visual and Multimedia Arguments” on eClass.

Assignment: Critical Reading Assignment #2

5. Week of Sept. 29: Forms of Inference: Why Do We Believe What We Believe?

Reading: “Deductive Arguments” on eClass.

Assignment: Critical Reading Assignment #3.

6. Week of Oct. 6: “That Depends on What You Mean By…”: Conceptual Reasoning

Reading: “Definition and Resemblance Arguments” on eClass.

Assignment: Recognizing Argument Patterns Exercise (eClass)

FALL READING WEEK – NO CLASS

7. Week of Oct. 20: How to Lie With Statistics: Inductive Reasoning and Empirical Arguments

Reading: “Are the Statistics Deceptive?” on eClass.

Assignment: Conceptual Reasoning Assignment

8. Week of Oct. 27: Reasoning About Reasons For Reasons: Complex Arguments

Reading: “Evaluating Arguments” on eClass.

9. Week of Nov. 3: Reasoning vs Persuading: Rhetoric and the Fallacies

Reading: “Informal Fallacies”

Assignment: Argument Reconstruction Assignment (5%)

10. Week of Nov. 10: Formal Fallacies and Fallacies of Diversion

Reading: “Fallacies of Distraction and Resemblance”

Assignment: Fallacy Exercises #1

11. Week of Nov. 17: Arguments and Arguers

Reading: “Emotions & Resemblance Combined: Appeal to Authority & Attacking the Person”

Assignment: Fallacy Exercises #2

12. Week of Nov. 24: Review and Test Preparation

FALLACY TEST

Reading: Study for TEST

Assignment: Fallacy Exercises #3

WINTER BREAK

13. Week of Jan. 5: Proposal Arguments

Reading: “Convergent Arguments”

14. Week of Jan. 12: How to Reason About Social Issues

Reading: “Principles of Social Justice”

15. Week of Jan. 19: How to Write Good

Reading: “Finding Sources”

Assignment: Convergent Argument Analysis (5%)

16. Week of Jan. 26: Introduction to Moral Reasoning

Reading: “Citing and Documenting Sources”

17. Week of Feb. 2: Moral Theories

Reading: “Principles of Individual Morality”

18. Week of Feb. 9: Liberalism and the State

Reading: “The Social Contract Tradition”

WINTER READING WEEK – NO CLASS

19. Week of Feb. 23: Left and Right

Reading: “The Communist Manifesto”

Assignment: Critical Essay (20%)

20. Week of Mar. 2: Writes and Wrongs

Reading: “Style and Usage”

21. Week of Mar. 9: Capitalism and Colonialism

Reading: “Capitalism and Marxism”

22. Week of Mar. 16: Who is a Person?

Reading: “Abortion”

23. Week of Mar. 23: Social Justice and Personal Responsibility

Reading: “Welfare and Social Justice”

24. Week of Mar. 30: Tying It All Together: Living With Our Differences in a Shared World

Reading: “Citizenship”

Assignment: Argumentative Essay (30%)

TBA

IMPORTANT COURSE INFORMATION FOR STUDENTS

Academic Honesty and Integrity:

York students are required to maintain high standards of academic integrity and are subject to the Senate Policy on Academic Honesty: http://secretariat-policies.info.yorku.ca/policies/academic-honesty-senate-policy-on/

There is also an academic integrity website with complete information about academic honesty. Students are expected to review the materials on the Academic Integrity SPARK page: http://www.yorku.ca/academicintegrity

Access/Disability:

York provides services for students with disabilities (including physical, medical, learning and psychiatric disabilities) needing accommodation related to teaching and evaluation methods/materials. Students in need of these services are asked to register with Disability Services as early as possible to ensure that appropriate academic accommodation can be provided. You are encouraged to meet with your professor early in the term to discuss your accommodation needs. Additional information is available through Counselling & Disability Services at

http://calendars.registrar.yorku.ca/2015-2016/services/student/counselling/index.htm or from disability service providers:

• Personal Counselling and Learning Skills Services: N110 BCSS, 416-736-5297
• Mental Health Disability Services: N110 BCSS, 416-736-5350
• Learning Disability Services: W128 BCSS, 416-736-5383
• Physical, Sensory and Medical Disability Services: N108 Ross, 416-736-5140, TTY: 416-736-5263

Hearing-impaired students can also contact psmds@yorku.ca

Glendon students - Counselling & Disability Services, Glendon Site: Glendon Hall E103, 416-487-6709

Religious Observance Accommodation:

York University is committed to respecting the religious beliefs and practices of all members of the community, and making accommodations for observances of special significance to adherents. Should any of the dates specified in this syllabus for an in-class test or examination pose such a conflict for you, contact the Course Director within the first three weeks of class. Similarly, should an assignment to be completed in a lab, practicum placement, workshop, etc., scheduled later in the term pose such a conflict, contact the Course director immediately. Please note that to arrange an alternative date or time for an examination scheduled in the formal examination periods (December and April/May), students must complete an Examination Accommodation Form, which can be obtained from Student Client Services, Bennett Student Services Centre or online at https://registrar.yorku.ca/pdf/exam-accommodation.pdf.

Student Conduct:

Students and instructors are expected to maintain a professional relationship characterized by courtesy and mutual respect and to refrain from actions disruptive to such a relationship. Moreover, it is the responsibility of the instructor to maintain an appropriate academic atmosphere in the classroom, and the responsibility of the student to cooperate in that endeavour.

Further, the instructor is the best person to decide, in the first instance, whether such an atmosphere is present in the class.

A statement of the policy and procedures involving disruptive and/or harassing behaviour by students in academic situations is available on the York website https://oscr.students.yorku.ca/student-conduct.

Important dates:

The last date to add the course without the course director’s permission is Sept. 16, 2025.

The last date to add the course with permission of course director is Sept. 30, 2025.

The last date to drop the course without receiving a grade is Feb. 3, 2025.

Please note that this information is subject to periodic update. For the most current information, please go to the CCAS webpage (see Reports, Initiatives, Documents): http://secretariat.info.yorku.ca/senate/