| PHIL 2140 - Introduction to Logic (Fall 2005) | ||||||||
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Instructor: Dr. Yingrui Yang (yangyri@rpi.edu)
Office: 307 Carnegie Building Phone: 276-8273 or -6473 Office Hours: Tuesday 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM, or by appointment Co-lecturers: Dr. Selmer Bringsjord (selmer@rpi.edu), Dr. Konstantine Arkoudas (konstantine@alum.mit.edu), Joshua Taylor (tayloj@rpi.edu), Andrew Shilliday (shilla@rpi.edu) Teaching Assistants: Eric Pratt (pratte@rpi.edu), Brian Boodman (boodmb@rpi.edu) Brian Boodman's Office Hours: - Mondays and Thursdays, 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM, Carnegie 307 (Professor Yang's office) Eric Pratt's Office Hours: - Monday, December 12, 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM, Carnegie 301A conference room (first room on left) - Tuesdays, 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM, Carnegie third floor common space (on the left) - Fridays, 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM, Carnegie 301A conference room (first room on left) Place: Amos Eaton Hall room 214 Time: Tuesdays & Fridays, 10:00 AM - 11:50 AM Textbook: Deduction: Introductory Symbolic Logic, Second Edition. Author: Daniel Bonevac Website: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/philosophy/faculty/bonevac/deduction/ Note: The answers to selected problems from the textbook can be found on the book's website above. |
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Announcements
Several students (with Windows machines) have had trouble running NDL; they get an error saying "Exception in thread 'main' java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:Ndl" on the command line. If you are getting this error, make sure you have the latest version of Java on your computer. This error can also be corrected by editing the ndl.bat file in the NDL directory. The downloaded version reads "java Ndl %1 %2", but should be corrected to read "java -classpath . Ndl %1 %2". Alternatively (and perhaps more easily for some), you can simply click here to download the corrected ndl.bat file, and replace your ndl.bat file with this one. A few students had questions about the feasibility of solving problems 14 and 20 of section 4.2 without the negation-conjunction and negation-disjunction (DeMorgan's) rules of section 4.5, and without disjunction or conditional rules from sections 4.3 and 4.4. I just went through the proofs for these problems, and they can both be done using only indirect proof, conjunction rules, and negation rules. You don't need to use DeMorgan's, disjunctions, or anything similar. You only need to assume the negation of your conclusion, then use indirect proof to assume certain truth values of p and q, and then prove that those truth values lead to contradictions, thus proving your conclusion. Here are the solutions to those problems. |
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Course Description
This course covers propositional logic and first order predicate logic, which are the foundations of the formal body of human knowledge. We will study formal languages and formal systems, and learn how to construct formal proofs within a system. Toward the end of this course, we will introduce some more advanced logical systems, such as modal logic. Some issues from psychology of reasoning concerning how untrained people reason systematically will also be addressed. This is a revolutionary course, in that it introduces courseware developed not at some other institution (e.g., Stanford, which has long produced courseware for teaching elementary logic), but rather here at RPI. The class consists of two components: (1) The traditional lectures on the formal systems involved. (2) The new Rensselaer-development courseware: Slate and NDL. For specifics please see the schedule on the syllabus. |
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