|
Phil
201: Logic (Wilson sections)
Do you want to win intellectual arguments? To
learn how to provide convincing evidence for your beliefs? To
sharpen your critical-thinking skills, avoid gullibility, and come
to reason with precision and rigor? Logic is the branch of
philosophy that cultivates precisely these skills. It does so by
exploring the structure of argumentation and by considering what it
means to provide evidence for a conclusion. Logical symbols and
techniques lay bare the argumentative structure of everyday
discussions, making it easy to distinguish valid from invalid
reasoning.
As in language, practice is the key to
achieving fluency in logic, especially given the lamentable
evolutionary fact that our brains seem hard-wired for illogical
reasoning on a wide range of subjects. Thus, the course involves
lots of practice: daily homework assignments cultivate the basic
skills and inculcate the basic techniques; daily quizzes provide
invigorating intellectual exercise, while stimulating a deeper
application of the basics. Tests are designed to be both fair and
challenging. All of these tasks and evaluative tools serve the
course’s major goal of refining mental acuity.
The course covers two major branches of
logic. The first and most venerable dates back to Aristotle and
deals with the relationships among sets, their members, and other
sets. (What follows, for example, from the facts that all men are
mortal and that Socrates is a man?) Among the things you’ll learn
about the other branch, symbolic logic, is why it’s wrong to
conclude that it’s raining, given that your friend brought an
umbrella and that he always brings an umbrella if it’s raining.
You’ll learn symbolism that makes analyzing such logical arguments
easy.
When Aristotle said that rationality
distinguishes humans from other animals, he was, in effect, arguing
for the study of logic—at least by those who think it desirable to
rise above our baser instincts and to cultivate the intellect,
indeed to cultivate it by attending to the nature of reasoning
itself. Logic is far more than an excellent preparation for a career
in business or law or virtually any other field; it is preparation
for the “life of the mind” that is uniquely human.
|
