Formation/Cours

This course is a concise presentation of modern formal logic. At the end of the course, students will have a solid knowledge of propositional logic. They will be able to carry out simple proofs using the method of natural deduction. Students will also have acquired key notions of contemporary logic such as the notion of formal validity, predicate, quantifiers, logical connectors, consistency, tautology, and contradiction.

Chapters I – VII (Volume I) of Paul Teller’s book: “A Modern Formal Logic Primer”.

Logic as the science of argument. Sentences and connectives. Truth functions. Compounding compound sentences. Rules of formation and rules of valuation. Transcription versus translation. Adequacy of transcriptions. Logical equivalence. Substitution of logical equivalents and some more laws. Logical truth and contradictions. Disjunctive normal form and the Sheffer Stroke. Validity. Invalidity and counterexamples. Soundness. The conditional. The biconditional. The idea of natural deduction. Subderivations. The complete rules of inference. Constructing correct derivations. Recognizing the main connective. Derivations: overview, definitions, and points to watch out for. Derived rules. Argument by cases. Further derived rules. Derivations without premises.