Philosophy 12A

What is it for an argument to be deductively valid? Intuitively, what’s required is that the conclusion “follow from” the premises, or that the truth of the premises “guarantee” the truth of the conclusion. In this course we will look at how to make this intuitive notion of validity formally precise. To this end, we will learn how to represent the logical form of English arguments in increasingly more fine-grained ways, and how to use semantic and syntactic methods to demonstrate the validity of arguments given such formal representations. Upon completing the course, students can expect to be familiar with the basic concepts of symbolic logic and to be in a better position to formulate and evaluate arguments in natural languages like English.