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.

These 24 engaging lectures teach you how to reason, how to persuade others that what you think is right, and how to judge and answer the arguments of others - and how they will judge yours. Professor Zarefsky makes argumentation accessible and familiar by breaking it into five easy-to-understand components: The tools of formal logic, while essential and even definitive for mathematics and programming computers, are inadequate to decide most controversial issues.

This course shows more useful approaches. Arguments can be divided into three parts: a claim, evidence, and an inference linking the evidence to the claim. All arguments fall into a handful of distinctive categories, and the same issues are at stake each time one of these distinctive patterns occurs. Three kinds of evidence can be advanced to prove an argument that something is true: objective data, social consensus, and personal credibility. There are six kinds of inference that link evidence to a claim: example, cause, sign, analogy, narrative, and form. How to use and challenge each is explained.

Along the way, you'll look at numerous actual controversies with a perspective that allows you to see the structure of all disputes. In this way, argument becomes an exchange, not just a flurry of words.