Office hours for the remainder of the term:

• Thursday, 6 December, 2pm-3pm
• Friday, 7 December, 10am-12pm
• Monday, 10 December, 11am-12pm and 1pm-2pm
• Thursday, 13 December, 2pm-4pm

This class offers a systematic introduction into the principles of reasoning and decision making. The importance of understanding these human activities can easily been seen in cases where we don't apply these principles in the best manner. One of the contexts in which humans have most systematically and most successfully developed their capacities for good reasoning is scientific inquiry. This is where we will turn for guidance. Hence, we will try to understand how science works and how reliable its results are.

For more information, please see the syllabus.

Course materials such as lecture notes, handouts, etc will be made available as they will be used in class. Lecture notes are no longer available.

• Syllabus
• Lecture 1 (Exemplary Science)
• Lecture 2 (Elements of Science)
• Lecture 3 (Valid Arguments)
• Lecture 4 (Confirmation, Falsification, Fallibility)
• Lecture 5 (Observation and Categories)
• Lecture 6 (Categorizing Phenomena)
• Lecture 7 (Observational Research)
• Directions and Sample Questions for Midterm Exam
• Coding Sheet for Time-Log Project
• Lecture 8 (Distributions and Samples)
• Paper Assignment 1 (due 13 November 2007)
• Lecture 9 (Relating Variables)
• Lecture 10 (Predicting from Correlations)
• Lecture 11 (Differences between Means)
• Lecture 12 (Correlation and Causation)
• Lecture 13 (Causal Explanation)
• Lecture 14 (Reasoning about and Graphing Causes)
• Paper Assignment 2 (due 29 November 2007)
• Lecture 15 (Causality and Experiments)
• Lecture 16 (Causation when Experiments are not Possible)
• Lecture 17 (Mechanism and Mechanistic Explanation)
• Directions and Sample Questions for Final Exam

This section lists all bugs that students have encountered working on the modules at inquiry.ucsd.edu. I will update this info as soon as I have news about particular problems and whether they have been fixed.

• 14 October 2007: Some have been receiving error messages concerning a syntax error in the module for "List Learning: A Mixed Case". The problem has now been fixed.
• 11 October 2007: Some students have experienced difficulties to rate their confidence levels after the three songs in the Observation module. The solution appears to be that you must wait until the song has fully played (twice) before you click the "submit" button.
• 5 October 2007: A number of you have experienced difficulties with graphics, either because they did not show at all, or because nothing would happen if you click. It turns out that this can happen for both IE7 on Vista, but also for a new version of Firefox, if used over a slow connection. Both issues should be fixed by now.

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