Philosophy 1145 Exam Study Guide Fall 2021

Exam Info

Exam Info: • You will have 2.5 hours to complete the exam on-time (12:00-2:30, Thursday, Dec 9). • There will be multiple versions of the exam. • The exam will take place on Moodle: there will be two assignment drop-boxes, one for multiple choice answers, one for the written component. • The multiple choice will be due at 12:20 on Moodle. • The rest of the questions on the exam are to be answered through text submission – the same way you submit the class engagement exercises. Or you can write the answers by hand and upload them as a pdf. • The exam is worth 35% and will have the same format as the midterm (minus quotations) and about a third longer than the midterm. • Basically: a midterm on the second half of the term PLUS some perhaps modified questions from the “first” midterm (see the bottom of the last page). So refamiliarize yourself with that material. • You are bound by your academic honesty pledge you made earlier in the term. • Any answers cut and pasted from class notes will receive a 0%. Answers must be put in your own words. Optimally, definition answers should cite the lecture slides from which the info is coming. • This is just a guide: your responsibilities: all the lectures and readings we have done during the second half of semester, as well as the content of the midterm. How to study: • Identify and be able to define technical terms – especially fallacies, appeals to emotion, etc. – from the lecture and readings and be able to put them in context or provide examples. • 1) focus on the way we did these things in lecture, 2) practice the various examples and exercises we have done. • Practice 1) identifying and defining fallacies, appeals to emotion, slanting, euphemisms and dysphemisms, rhetorical and loaded questions, argument flags and non-verbal elements, 2) identifying inference indicators, 3) identifying conclusions, premises, and Philosophy 1145 Exam Study Guide Fall 2021 noise, 4) diagramming arguments, including simple and complex arguments with linked and convergent premises, 5) identifying simple and complex propositions and logical connectives, 6) symbolizing and translating propositions and arguments, and 7) constructing proofs of symbolized arguments using our 6 rules of inference. Topics: • The Daily Show chapter and related lectures: fallacies and manipulative persuasion. Be able to define with examples the technical terms from this lecture: manipulative versus respectful persuasion, sophists, satire, satirical techniques, euphemism and dysphemisms, spin and talking points, appeals to emotion and biases, informal fallacies – all with examples. • Parts of chapter 6 (in the fallacy lectures): speech acts, loaded questions, hidden premises and conclusions, nonverbal elements: argument flags and visual demonstrations. • We also discussed some material from chapter 7 (pp. 168-174) in the fallacy lectures: vagueness, ambiguity, and equivocation. • The important video clips we looked at in class, including Colbert on “truthiness” and the use of the montage, attack ads, etc. • Chapter 4: simple and extended arguments, explanations versus arguments, inference indicators, argument narratives, rhetorical questions. • Chapter 5: diagraming simple and extended arguments with convergent and/or linked premises. • Propositional logic: simple and complex propositions, logical connectives (including two ways to symbolize disjunctions and different forms of conditionals), 6 rules of inference, 2 formal fallacies, translating from words to symbols, symbolizing propositions and arguments, proofs for the validity of argumen