Online Class: Introduction to Logic

One of the very earliest forms of academic study, long before science was even a thing and gods were still believed to reside in the mountains, was the examination into logic. Nowadays, the concept of logic seems to just mean an ability to apply rational thought, but in reality, logic is much more than that. Logic is the system of rules that governs what is rational, and what is not.

In this course, we will introduce many of the concepts that are involved in various forms of logical study. We will examine both formal and informal logic, differentiate between inductive and deductive reasoning, and take a look at some of the more advanced schools of logic. Because formal logic is a study focused on taking the colloquial out of any statements and reducing them to a pure abstract, some of the following lessons will involve an introduction to some of the formal systems and languages involved. For the most part, though, this introductory course will try to relate as many concepts as possible using plain English, in order to make the lessons more accessible and comprehensible. In this course, we will also review a number of paradoxes and fallacies that are inherent in logic, as well as some of the history and the applications possible with logic.

The aim of this course is not to give a comprehensive understanding of logic, as that would take a number of very involved degrees. Hopefully, it will leave you with a clearer understanding of logic, both in the abstract, and that you can apply to everyday life.

What is Logic?

Put as simply as possible, logic is the study of constructing and deconstructing an argument that something is true or false. A set of consistent rules are established, and applying those rules to any particular argument determines whether the argument is valid or invalid. Logic cannot be applied to any statements that do not have a binary answer; a statement must be capable of being proven true or false for logic to be applied to it.

Language and Logic

Logic is primarily involved with the thought process behind determining whether something is true or not. Because thought processes are fundamentally abstract, logic is fundamentally based upon the language a concept is expressed in. The language itself doesn't matter; many of the first rational arguments were conducted in Greek, so their logic was based upon Greek. The concepts and examples we will discuss in this course will be in English, but the principles could be extended to any other language. There is a fundamental issue with language, however: language changes. Words evolve, sometimes over the course of centuries, sometimes much sooner. Dialects form in different regions, making the same sentence in one region mean an entirely different thing somewhere else. Because language cannot provide a rigid structure for logical arguments, there have been a number of attempts to create logical systems that are not reliant upon language.