Professor Tom Stoneham and Dr Barry Lee are the lead educators on this course. For this run of the course we’re also joined by Dr Rob Trueman. Tom is the …
How this all works Over the next four weeks we will be exploring formal logic and its use as a tool to clarify and evaluate reasoning and arguments expressed in …
Here’s what we’re going to mean by an ‘argument’. What is an argument? An argument is a collection of claims made up of premises and a conclusion. An argument (as …
Last week we began to see how we could use a formal language to clarify and evaluate claims and arguments expressed in a natural language like English. This week we’ll …
So far, we’ve looked at arguments expressed in an everyday language: English. Logicians, linguists, and philosophers call everyday languages (like English, Swahili, Arabic, and Mandarin) ‘natural’ languages. These are what …
In this step we’ll look at whether the version of the Problem of Evil we’ve been looking at is formally valid. How did you get on? Formally valid or not …
There are five basic sentences in our representation of the argument. So a full truth-table would have thirty-two rows. That would be quite a hefty truth-table! But there is a …
In this step we’re going to look at a more serious and challenging argument. One reason the argument is challenging is simply the number of basic sentences involved. We’ll look …
Our aim in this course has been to see how formal logic can be used as a tool to clarify and evaluate arguments expressed in natural language. Let’s apply what …
This video gives an example of testing for logical equivalence using a truth-table. In this case, we show that ‘(P & Q)’ is logically equivalent to ‘~(~P (vee) ~Q)’. This …
This video shows another example of testing for validity using a truth-table. This time looking at an argument involving a conditional. Let’s pick up on a couple of key points …
In this video, we see how we can test an argument for formal validity using a truth-table. Here’s the truth-table for our representation of the argument: Figure 1. The truth-table …
This video shows how we define the meaning and logical powers of arrow using a truth-table. The remainder of this step introduces further discussion of this connective. Key points about …