Philosophy 12A

This course is a gentle introduction to symbolic logic. Most generally, we’ll be investigating the concept of logical consequence, roughly, the notion that certain claims follow from certain other ones in virtue of their logical form. To try to sharpen our understanding of this concept and various related ones, we’ll learn a new formal language—the language of first-order logic—in stages. At each stage, we’ll make sense of logical concepts in terms of the truth values of sentences in the new language. In addition, we’ll learn a useful method for demonstrating that sentences in the language are logical consequences of others: natural deduction proofs in a Fitch-style system.