This is a course in psychology
which fulfills both the CSU and the new CSULB General Education critical
thinking requirement. The overall goals of this course are to encourage
you to become more aware of your own thinking and reasoning processes,
and to enable you to think more carefully about complex issues, so that
you can make more thoughtful, well-reasoned judgments and decisions for
yourself and can fairly evaluate judgements and decisions made by others.
The overarching theme of this
course, the one which we will find ourselves returning to in a variety
of ways, is an awareness of the defaults, shortcuts, and mistakes
in human thinking. Mistakes in reasoning, such as the logical fallacies,
block good thinking directly. The case is a little different,
however, with respect to defaults and shortcuts, because defaults
and shortcuts may be beneficial to us in certain, perhaps many or most,
circumstances. While we need to be able to identify mistakes
in thinking, we also need to realize that thinking which might be good
or appropriate in some circumstances may mislead us in others.
Critical thinking will mean developing an awareness not only of the mistakes,
but also of the defaults and shortcuts, and judgment about when they need
to be questioned, and strategies to overcome them when we need to.