logic

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A Game for Gaining Logical Fluency

Matthias Jenny, who recently received his PhD in philosophy from MIT, has started working in the tech industry. He wrote to share with Daily Nous readers a game he created to help people develop basic logical fluency. (more…)

Visualizing The Logical Structure of Arguments: A New Platform (guest post by Simon Cullen)

The following is a guest post * by Simon Cullen (Princeton), which continues an earlier discussion of his work teaching with argument mapping techniques and software.

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Ruth Millikan Wins 2017 Schock Prize

Ruth Millikan, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is the winner of the 2017 Rolf Shock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. The prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (the same organization that awards the Nobel prizes), is 500,000 Swedish krona, or approximately $55,000. (more…)

Teach Everyone Logic?

Clifford argued that we are morally responsible not merely for what we do and say, but also for what we believe… When we show ourselves to be uncritical and careless with own our beliefs, we implicitly invite others to do the same. And, perhaps more obviously, we invite others to fool us. We encourage dishonesty and deception. Each time we believe something that ..

Logical Fallacies Through Funny Videos

There are online lists of logical fallacies , websites dedicated to explaining them, posters, children’s books, various videos, and, of course, memes. That many of the examples used to illustrate fallacies are humorous is no accident, as a lot of humor involves both upsetting expectations (e.g., saying something that deviates from what we think follows from what’s a..

Designing a High School Logic & Critical Thinking Course

Landon Hedrick is a PhD student at the University of Nebraska who is also a high school philosophy teacher at Vanguard Classical School in Colorado. He is looking for some help meeting the specific challenges of designing a logic and critical thinking course in which the materials “are all appropriate for the audience, both in terms of content and in terms of ..

Teaching Students Logic Improves Their Logical Reasoning Skills

Newflash: teaching students logic improves their logical reasoning skills—at least according to some new research. You may be thinking, “duh,” but that would be a mistake. After all, “teach” isn’t a success term. And as it turns out, “there is little evidence that studying logic itself improves one’s logical thinking.” (more…)

The Enduring Evolution of Logic (guest post by Thomas Ferguson & Graham Priest)

The following guest post * is by Thomas Ferguson and Graham Priest (both of CUNY) and appears here via a special arrangement with Oxford University Press and the OUP Blog, at which it is also posted. (more…)

U.S. Politics with Logical and Factual Annotation

This is a great public service and a great idea.

Stefan Schubert, a visiting philosophy professor at the London School of Economics, and Spencer Greenberg, a mathematician and entrepreneur who started Clearer Thinking, a site aimed to help people “avoid thinking traps and make improved decisions, to better achieve the goals they value most,” are producing videos ..

Pre-Grad School Logic Preparation

An undergraduate who is interested in pursuing graduate studies in philosophy writes in seeking advice about making up for deficits in his logic background:

I’m a student at a small liberal arts college. I have a double major in Philosophy and Literature. My school’s Philosophy program is very good at what it does, but it is limited. Among other things, there are..

Texas Higher Ed Board v. Logic

With just a few days before the start of the school year, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board has removed from the curriculum a number of courses meant to fulfill the “Language, Philosophy, & Culture” core requirement at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). Among the struck courses are several in philosophy, including a number of ethics cours..

The Open Logic Text

The Open Logic Project, instigated by Richard Zach (Calgary) and including Aldo Antonelli (UC Davis), Andrew Arana (UIUC), Jeremy Avigad (Carnegie Mellon), Gillian Russell (Wash U. St. Louis, soon to be UNC), Nicole Wyatt (Calgary), and Audrey Yap (Victoria), and a student assistant, has created the Open Logic Text, an open-source, collaborative logic text and all a..

Philosophers: Disappointingly Normal

Philosophers are sometimes thought of as expert thinkers, more rational and less prone to errors in reasoning than others. Whether this is true, though, is an empirical question, and it is one that several researchers have taken up over the past decade or so. Their findings regularly show that philosophers, like the ordinary folk, are susceptible to various cognitiv..

Logic Problem Goes Viral (updated)

Perhaps you saw this logic problem, purported to have been given to fifth graders in Singapore, flying around social media yesterday:

That’s right: a logic problem has gone viral.

It turns out that the problem was from a math olympiad test for high-school students, but perhaps the “are you smarter than a fifth grader from Singapore” framing helped propel t..

Mathematical Logic & Foundations Chart (w/ further updates)

The above photo is a detail from a large, hand drawn chart entitled “Mathematical Logic and Foundations, 1847-1947.” It was made in 1976 by Joel Friedman (I believe this Joel Friedman, emeritus at UC Davis). A print of it has been hanging up in the University of South Carolina Department of Philosophy for as long as anyone here can remember. I do not know whether it..

Buddhism’s Logic

Buddhist thought, and Asian thought in general, has often been written off by Western philosophers. How can contradictions be true? What’s all this talk of ineffability? This is all nonsense. The constructions I have described show how to make precise mathematical sense of the Buddhist views. This does not, of course, show that they are true. That’s a different matt..