Course Overview

Learn the fundamentals of argumentation and build a foundation for communication and reasoning that will benefit you in every area of your life.

What is Effective Reasoning?

What is effective reasoning? And how can it be done persuasively? These questions have been asked for thousands of years, yet some of the best thinking on reasoning and argumentation is recent and represents a break from the past. This course teaches you how to reason, persuade others, and judge and answer arguments—along with how they’ll judge yours.

Professor Zarefsky makes argumentation accessible by breaking it into five components.

Key Components of Argumentation

• Understanding Arguments: Arguments can be divided into three parts: a claim, evidence, and an inference linking the evidence to the claim.

• Evidence Types: Three kinds of evidence can be used to prove an argument: objective data, social consensus, and personal credibility.

• Inference Types: There are six kinds of inference: example, cause, sign, analogy, narrative, and form.

Course Structure

The course consists of 24 engaging lectures:

• Introducing Argumentation and Rhetoric – 32 min

• Underlying Assumptions of Argumentation – 30 min

• Formal and Informal Argumentation – 30 min

4. History of Argumentation Studies – 30 min

• Argument Analysis and Diagramming – 30 min

• Complex Structures of Argument – 30 min

• Case Construction – Requirements and Options – 30 min

• Stasis – The Heart of the Controversy – 30 min

• Attack and Defense I – 31 min

• Attack and Defense II – 31 min

• Language and Style in Argument – 30 min

• Evaluating Evidence – 31 min

• Reasoning from Parts to Whole – 30 min

• Reasoning with Comparisons – 30 min

• Establishing Correlations – 30 min

16. Moving from Cause to Effect – 31 min

• Commonplaces and Arguments from Form – 30 min

• Hybrid Patterns of Inference – 31 min

• Validity and Fallacies I – 30 min

20. Validity and Fallacies II – 30 min

• Arguments between Friends – 31 min

• Arguments among Experts – 30 min

• Public Argument and Democratic Life – 31 min

• The Ends of Argumentation – 31 min