PHIL50 Basics, for the time being...

Stanford University, Spring 2011
PHIL50 Introduction to Logic

Professor: Valeria de Paiva (PhD Cantab)
Email: valeria.depaiva@gmail.com
Lectures: MW 10:00-10:50 Room 206 EDUC
BOOK: Language, Proof and Logic,
John Barwise, John Etchemendy
University of Chicago Press
ISBN 157586374X


WARN­ING! Do not buy a used copy of the text! The copy of the soft­ware that comes with the book can only be reg­istered once. If you can­not reg­is­ter the soft­ware, you can­not sub­mit so­lu­tions to home­work ex­er­cises of take-home exam prob­lems or have the cor­rect­ness of your so­lu­tions au­to­mat­i­cally checked for you prior to sub­mit­ting them.

HOME­WORK/QUIZZES: Each week, there will be ei­ther a home­work as­sign­ment due or a quiz. In ad­di­tion, there will be a midterm exam and a final exam. Each exam will con­sist of an (open-book, open-notes) take-home part and a (closed-book, closed-notes) in-class part.

TOP­ICS TO BE COV­ERED:

1. Why logic? Computational thinking for philosophers? (1 lec­ture):

2. Propo­si­tional Log­ics (approx 10 lec­tures):
• The syn­tax and se­man­tics of propo­si­tional log­ics
• The log­i­cal con­nec­tives.
• Build­ing truth ta­bles to test for­mal va­lid­ity, both "by hand" and using Boole.
. The dis­tinc­tion be­tween im­pli­ca­tion and im­pli­ca­ture
. "Fitch" and formal proofs.

3. First-Or­der Log­ics (approx 10 lec­tures):
• The syn­tax and se­man­tics of first-or­der log­ics
• Ex­press­ing your­self in first-or­der log­ics
• Build­ing struc­tures to demon­strate for­mal in­va­lid­ity, by hand and using Tarski's World
• Con­struct­ing for­mal de­duc­tions to demon­strate for­mal va­lid­ity, by hand and using Fitch


4. Modal Propo­si­tional Log­ics (3 lec­tures):
• Deontic, epistemic, tem­po­ral, dy­namic, and gen­eral modal propo­si­tional log­ics

5. Wrap-up (1 lec­ture):
• Spe­cial em­pha­sis on the ques­tion of how much sup­port a for­mal de­riva­tion of a propo­si­tion pro­vides for be­liev­ing it to be true