Scientific Methods: How Science Really Works

HPSC-X340 — Spring 2024

Instructor
Leah Savion
Course Description

This is a second 8 week course.

Sensory input contributes a limited portion of data to our body of knowledge; inferences we draw from that input constitute the majority of the information we utilize in navigating our way around the world and expanding our social and scientific understanding of its regularities.

This course illuminates the crucial distinction between making correct or incorrect inferences. Students will learn the conceptual subtleties of scientific and logical reasoning, how to explicate the underlying structure of sentences and arguments in a language, and the distinct rules and procedures of drawing correct conclusions embedded in first order logical theories. The course will include some findings from Cognitive Science that may explain wide-spread deviations from the logical norms of correct reasoning.