Logic and Practical Reasoning LIBS 7008

Course offerings

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Recognize and understand the role of the linguistic elements of arguments.
• Understand the conversational rules that govern conversational acts.
• See how conversational implication affects the meaning of speech acts.
• Recognize the standard form of an argument and understand the concepts of validity, truth and soundness.
• See that good arguments must not beg the question.
• Understand why successful arguments depend on finding common ground.
• Understand the role of assuring, guarding, and discounting expressions, as well as "argumentative performatives".
• Recognize the role of evaluative language and its use and misuse in argument (persuasive definitions, euphemisms and figurative language).
• Understand the many uses of arguments.
• Distinguish 'impersonal normative' from 'dialectical' justification .
• Distinguish proper attempts at refutation (parallel reasoning, reductios) from illegitimate ones (straw man).
• Recognize the role of argument in systematization and simplification of belief systems.
• Understand the role of argument in giving explanations and in providing excuses.
• Apply learned skills in a 'close analysis' of a moderately complicated argument.
• Reconstruct arguments according to a standard pattern.
• See how to remove logically irrelevant material from an argumentative passage.
• Clarify terms and break down arguments into individual claims.
• Arrange subarguments in logical order.
• Recognize that 'real life' arguments usually depend on 'suppressed' premises, and that, when acceptable, these premises often involve shared facts, 'analytic truths' and moral principles.
• Tease out hidden premises that embody controversial assumptions.
• Apply the 'method of reconstruction' to some extended arguments.
• Realize that all arguments terminate in fundamental principles, which may be part of competing frameworks.
• See the value of formal propositional logic in explaining and demonstrating some kinds of validity.
• Recognize occurrences of logical conjunction, disjunction and negation.
• Recognize the argument pattern of disjunctive syllogism.
• Understand the role of truth-functional connectives in propositional logic.
• Testing for validity using truth tables.
• Distinguish indicative conditionals from subjunctive conditionals; give the truth table for indicative conditionals; and recognize some valid and invalid argument patterns involving conditionals (modus ponens, modus tollens, and hypothetical syllogism).
• Translating some everyday language sentences using truth-functional connectives.
• See how formal logic can determine validity in categorical arguments.
• Represent categorical claims with Venn diagrams.
• Recognize basic categorical form (i.e., A, E, I and O) propositions and represent them in Venn diagrams.
• Translate everyday language claims into basic categorical form.
• Recognize which categorical claims are contradictories (and contraries) of others.
• See that 'particular' categorical claims have 'existential commitment'.
• Recognize which categorical claims are immediate inferences from others.
• Recognize categorical syllogisms and use Venn diagrams to evaluate them for validity.
• See how various inductive styles of reasoning can produce strong arguments.
• Recognize the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning standards.
• See how inference to the best explanation works.
• Recognize, use and evaluate arguments from analogy and distinguish them from inference to the best explanation.
• Appreciate and evaluate causal reasoning, in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and 'Mill's methods'.
• Use inductive generalization to argue from samples to larger populations.
• Recognize some biased samples.
• Use and evaluate statistical syllogisms.
• Understand and evaluate some arguments involving probability (if time permits).
• See how the representative and availability heuristics can cause logical 'blunders'.
• Grasp the notion of a priori probability.
• Understand and use some probability laws (addition, multiplication and conditional probability).
• Recognize and apply Bayes's Theorem.
• Understand expected monetary and overall value.
• Understand some principles of decision under uncertainty.
• Recognize and avoid the Gambler's Fallacy.
• See how regression to the mean can affect the relevance of exceptional events.
• Recognize that 'strange things happen' all the time.

Effective as of Fall 2004

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