Logic

We ended this evening with a survey of Conversion, Obversion, and Contraposition. I started by finishing up a point from chapter three concerning the difference between sufficient and necessary conditions. Everyone seemed pretty fine with those. So we went on to Informal Fallacies using the Nizkor site I have a link to in the syllabus and the text. We went through these pretty quickly but they are good to be familiar with because psychologically they are traditionally powerful ways of getting people to do what you want them to do, or to believe what you want them to believe. But they are not examples of good reasoning and should be avoided if you want to be a good critical thinker. I did some things to relate fallacies to jokes and mentioned Daniel Dennett's book Inside Jokes and explained the basic thesis that jokes and humor are universal in humans because they reward debugging problems. After the break we went on to look again at Categorical Reasoning - chapter 5. Much of this was a review of the standard categorical statement forms A, E, I, O and the square of opposition. This seemed fun. Part of the class was testing true and false statements to see if they do in fact fit this theory. One type of statements that do not clearly fit are referred to as relational predicates. The quiz question had nothing to do with any of this but was sure to be interesting: what does it mean to you to be a Seawolf?