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Instructor: Nancy Salay

When we uncover the formal structure of our thoughts and utterances, we gain a deeper understanding of what we think and say. When we study the formal structures themselves, we learn something of the processes underlying cognitive activity in general. Classical logic is a formalisation of deductive reasoning, an ideal that we rarely achieve in our everyday discourse. By familiarising ourselves with formal patterns and recognising when and how form and content mutually influence one another, we train ourselves to become better thinkers. Ultimately, this is what you will learn in this class — how to think well. 

More specifically, you will learn how to translate natural language arguments into the more precise languages of first and second-order logic and how to assess the deductive structure of those arguments using both syntactic and semantic models. Whenever relevant, we will talk about the differences between natural and formal languages, focusing on features such as expressiveness and exactness, and we will consider the consequences for language and thought. Finally, we will explore some of the philosophical issues that arise when we attempt to formalise good reasoning. 

There will be some technical work in this course, but nothing that even those who fear, probably incorrectly, that they are ‘bad at math’ couldn’t handle.