Technical Reasoning/Logic Introduction

Why Logic?

There are some benefits of learning logic which are immediately obvious.

• Your school requires you to take a logic course, in order to fulfill a prerequisite for your math or computer science major.
• It makes you better at reasoning.

I think both of these miss the most important virtues of learning logic:

• It makes you better at communicating reasons to others.
• It shows the need for the world to have at least a somewhat shared language and organization of knowledge.

This last point is, in a way, the entire modern foundation of science!

I claim that the main way in which modern science is different from ancient science, is that we cooperate across space and time to build on each other's discoveries. We hand down theories from one generation to the next, and transmit them across language and geographic barriers, in a global community.

Of course this existed in previous eras, though not nearly with the same degree of openness and cooperation. Yet the biggest distinction between the ancient and modern ways of science is not just in degree, but in the was that we share systems of ideas and analysis.

In this course, we will come to understand various systems of logic, and see how they apply to several difference sciences and philosophies. Logic will not, by itself, resolve all conflicts and answer all questions. But it does give a kind of shared communication which allows us to cooperate as a global community, in the advancement of knowledge.

Therefore, as one progresses through this course, one should be especially attentive to developing the skill of exposing your ideas and reasons. This is so that others may easily understand you, and validate your thought process. This course is, in this way, essentially training in how to be a participant in the global project of science.