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Join this college-preparatory course for an in-depth study of symbolic logic. You will find this course especially helpful if you are interested in computer science or philosophy.
Total classes: 12
Prerequisite: There are no prerequisites for this course. It is beneficial for you to have taken “Reasoning and Rhetoric” and “Classical Syllogistic Logic” (available through Unlimited Access), but this is not necessary to understand the material presented here.
Suggested grade level: 10th to 12th
Suggested credit: One full semester Symbolic Logic
Description
In this course, we will study the rudiments of propositional logic. This type of logic is more advanced than syllogistic logic but does not introduce quantifiers or relations. This course is ideal for an upper-class high school student preparing for college and the material covered here has applications in both the sciences and the humanities. Students interested in philosophy or computer science will find the material covered here a useful preparation for college level study. We will proceed slowly and methodically, covering the essentials of propositional logic and mastering all of the basic forms of deductive inference. We will learn about truth tables, truth-functional connectives, forms of valid inference, and methods of proof.
Outline
Week one: Introduction- Symbolic Language and Notation
Week two: Disjunction and Negation
Week three: Conditionals and Material Implication
Week four: Argument Forms and Substitution Instances
Week five: Formal Definition of Validity
Week six: Material and Logical Equivalences
Week seven: Argument forms and proofs
Week eight: Extended proofs of validity
Week nine: Replacement rules
Week ten: Natural deduction
Week eleven: Proof by Reductio ad Absurdum
Week twelve: Conditional proofs and subproofs
Materials and Homework
Readings and Homework: Expect to spend at least 1 -3 hours per week on the reading assignments and homework. The readings are short but dense, but much of the course load will involve working through the homework problems which appear in the textbook.
