Basic Logic/Crit Thinking

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course is about critical thinking. We will understand \critical thinking" as the activity of analyzing whether arguments are valid. An argument proposes that one or more statements follow from (or is a conclusion of) one or more other statements (premises or evidence statements). Do the alleged conclusions really follow from the premises or evidence? Why or why not? To answer these questions, we will learn rst order logic, and use that as our basic tool for analysis. In particular, we will learn how to formulate statements precisely so there is no ambiguity, we will learn how to build models of the situations we want to talk about, and we will learn a variety of proof systems that give us a fairly systematic way of deciding if arguments are valid.