Archive for the ‘logic’ Category

Wanted: Philosophy Examples for Sentence Logic

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

I’d appreciate any suggestions of cool philosophical arguments or puzzles that exemplify (or lend themselves to the exemplification of) key concepts of the sentential calculus.

I find it’s much easier to come up with this sort of thing for the predicate calculus. For example, discussions of Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God or Descartes’s argument for substance dualism (or the Heideggarian suggestion that nothing noths) are fun to discuss with students who can handle symbolizations with quantifiers and predicates. But I’m sniffing around for fun things of philosophical applicability to do with students who are just learning to toss around the dots, vels, tildes, and horseshoes.

Thanks in advance!

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Monsters of Logic

Monday, September 17th, 2007
Monsters of Logic

Monsters of Logic,
originally uploaded by Pete Mandik.

It’s that time of the semester again: time to tell logic students the bad news that material conditionals are false only when they have true antecedents and false consequents.

I’m always looking for new ways to take the sting out of the false antecedent cases. Poking around the internet yielded some nice resources.

I especially liked this survey of methods of teaching material conditionals: A Comparison of Techniques for Introducing Material Implication

See also:
Conditional Statements and Material Implication
and
Material Implication Revisited

Posted in logic, teaching | 7 Comments »