Philosophy 12A

When you encounter (or assert) a conclusion that is supposed to follow from some premises, it is often helpful to know why (and whether) the conclusion really does follow from the premises—why (and whether) the argument with that conclusion and those premises is valid. In this course, you will develop the skills to tell, for many different arguments, why the conclusion does or does not follow from the premises. In particular, you will learn how to translate many arguments in English into a formal language (such as the Language of Sentential Logic or the Language of First-Order Logic), how to test whether some of those arguments are valid (for example, using truth tables for arguments in the Language of Sentential Logic), and how to demonstrate the validity (by constructing a proof in a natural deduction system) or invalidity (by constructing a counterexample) of any argument in one of our formal languages.