Section 1:
Chapter 1: Basic Concepts: We will not study Section 1.7.

• The primary concepts for which you will be responsible are: argument, premise, conclusion, validity, invalidity, conditional statement, antecedent, consequent, deductive argument, inductive argument, soundness, acceptability, strong inductive argument, and weak inductive argument.

3rd Exam:

• Thursday, 14 December, 8-9:50am (Blue Books)
  

Course Requirements

Quizzes. There will be a quiz on almost every Friday of the semester. Each quiz will be worth 10 points. There are no make-ups on quizzes. The one lowest quiz score will be dropped at the end of the semester in calculating the final grade for the course.

Arguments. I will be assigning you the task of constructing arguments during the term. Each of these assignments will count as one quiz score. There will be three of these assignments, the level of difficulty increasing as we progress. Each assignment will make use of concepts and skills in the corresponding chapters of the text. There are no make-ups on these assignments and they must be typed and turned in in hard copy.

Exams. There will be 3 exams. These exams are not comprehensive, with 2 exceptions: 1) Chapter 1 is fair game for all exams, quizzes, and argument assignments, 2) Both the 2nd and 3rd exams will test your knowledge of the material in Chapter 3. Each exam will be worth 100 points. Blue Books (Examination Books) are required for each exam and may be obtained in the HSU Bookstore.

Important Items of Information

Grading. General grading scheme: 100-93 = A; 92-90 = A-; 89-87 = B+; 86-83 = B; 82-80 = B-; 79-77 = C+; 76-73 = C; 72-70 = C-; 69-67 = D+; 66-60 = D; 59-00 = F. I do not grade on a curve. How do I grade? Fair, but merciful. I am willing to discuss grading at any time during the semester. To receive credit for this class, you must achieve a final grade of "C-" or higher. Philosophy majors must achieve a final grade of "C" or higher in order for this course to satisfy the Logic requirement in the Department of Philosophy.

Practice. The text contains a plethora of exercises and examples with which you should be acquainted. Daily Practice is one of the best ways to get good at the kinds of things you will be tested on in this course. I urge you to work the exercises in each assigned chapter and encourage you to visit me in my office for discussion on even minor points of concern. If my office hours do not fit your schedule, we can arrange to meet at a mutually convenient time.

Academic honesty. It is the student's responsibility to know policy regarding academic honesty. For more information, go to the HSU catalog.

Students with Disabilities. Persons who wish to request disability-related accommodations should contact the Student Disability Resource Center in House 71, 826-4678 or 826-5392. Some accommodations may take several weeks to arrange.

Attendance & disruptive behavior. It is the student's responsibility to know the policy regarding attendance and disruptive behavior. Attendance is required in this class. My response to disruptive behavior in this class will be legal, moral, rational and swift. For more information, go to the HSU catalog.

Cell phone & texting policy. You are welcome to have your cell phone turned on during class. Please set it on "stun" in case you get a call. If you get a call in class that you must answer, please leave class to take the call. Text messaging while in class, during class time, is prohibited.

Area A Outcomes: Critical Thinking
Upon completing this requirement, students will be able to:

• identify the premises and conclusion of an argument and determine its validity and soundness
• analyze, criticize and advocate ideas
• distinguish deductive from inductive argument forms, identify their fallacies, and reason inductively and deductively
• distinguish matters of fact from issues of judgment or opinion and reach well-supported factual or judgmental conclusions from a wide diversity of real world examples.

Office hours:


• Mondays & Wednesdays: 10-11am.
• Tuesdays & Thursdays: 10:30am - 12:00pm.
• Also by appointment.

Office location: BSS 502B
Phone: 8265758 (office); 4996445 (cell)
eMail: Click
Main Logic Webpage: Click
Michael's page: Click

Note important dates:

Last day to declare Credit/No Credit option: 17 October.
Last day to drop a class without signatures and approved serious and compelling reason: 5 September.
Last day to drop with approved serious and compelling reason: 31 November.

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About the Subject Matter
HSU Catalog Course Description: Study of correct reasoning. Sentential logic, informal fallacies, and certain paradigms of inductive reasoning. Nature of language, artificial and natural.

In what follows, when I use the phrase "critical thinking," I mean logic-based critical thinking. It seems that every department at the university is now claiming to teach their students critical thinking skills. While I don't claim that they are not, I do claim that these departments are not teaching their students critical thinking based on rules of inference and/or axioms of replacement, and the traditional fallacies of reasoning. I suspect we would learn a great deal by studying the meaning of 'critical thinking' as used by other departments.

There are many things to learn in this course. In the beginning we will focus on some of the core concepts of logic, such as validity, soundness, acceptability and consistency. Argumentation is the primary area of study, with "good reasoning" being the highest value recognized. We will at once learn to distinguish arguments from nonarguments and study ways to evaluate arguments. This will be true also for the constituents of arguments, that is, premises and conslusions. The traditional distinction between deduction and induction will be drawn and some common forms of inductive reasoning examined.

Some of our study of induction will carry over into the chapter on informal fallacies of reasoning, where we will look at such examples as appeal to authority, argument from pity, ignorance, ad hominem, and begging the question. Errors in reasoning will be the topic here, and understanding what these errors consist in will both allow us to be more careful in avoiding them and give us a definitive contrast with arguments which do not commit fallacies. Many people have argued that the study of informal fallacies is one of the most practical and useful experiences of one's entire college career.

Up to this point we will have concentrated on critical thinking from what may be called the informal perspective. Of equal importance is critical thinking involving the use of logical symbolization and the distinction between natural and artificial languages. This study is marked by a rigor matched only by that of mathematics proper. A crucial difference here is that formal or symbolic logic is not mathematics. To do the work in formal (sentential) logic, we will first construct an artificial language, translating from natural language (in our case, English) into the artificial. The value of this exercise will be recognized by what is learned about both the syntax and semantics of language in general. This will take us a long way toward the formal analyses of arguments.

With the tools in hand to evaluate arguments in logical notation, we will work through three methods/techniques for anlyzing arguments. Two of these, truth tables and truth trees, allow us to determine the validity or invalidity of any argument in sentential logic. These techniques each provide insight into vital aspects of critical thinking. For example, tables elucidate the concepts of "validity" and "invalidity" to a degree unparalleled in sentential logic, while trees provide an excellent opportunity for understanding reasoning via reductio ad absurdum.

The third technique is called "natural deduction". While for some pure logicians, this is perhaps at the heart of logic, for us it will constitute only a relatively small part of our study. The insights gained here must not be taken lightly, however, because they are formidable. In proving arguments to be valid, we begin to understand 'inference' from the logical perspective. This cannot be overemphasized, because inference (good, bad, weak and strong) is one of the aspects common to all forms of logic-based critical thinking.

Another important part of the system of natural deduction is the work done using the Rule of Conditional Proof. Many times reasoning employs the drawing of assumptions. Understanding what assumptions to make, and how to deal with them once made, will fill in gaps in reasoning processes, including, for example, those of science.

If there is time, we will move into predicate logic. Here we extend our formal work to include more complex sentences and arguments using such quantifiers as 'all', 'none', and 'some'. This again will bring out aspects of syntax, semantics, inferences and relations.

Increasing your logic-based critical thinking skills broadly is the very point of this course.

                                                                                            Copyright 2007 by Michael F. Goodman.

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