1: The Basics of Logical Analysis
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Like many human activities, reasoning can be done well, or it can be done badly. The goal of logic is to distinguish good reasoning from bad. Good reasoning is not necessarily effective reasoning; in fact, as we shall see, bad reasoning is pervasive and often extremely effective—in the sense that people are often persuaded by it. In Logic, the standard of goodness is not effectiveness in the sense of persuasiveness, but rather correctness according to logical rules.
- 1.1: What is Logic?
- In Logic, the object of study is reasoning. This is an activity that humans engage in—when we make claims and back them up with reasons, or when we make inferences about what follows from a set of statements.
- 1.2: Basic Notions - Propositions and Arguments
- Reasoning involves claims or statements—making them and backing them up with reasons, drawing out their consequences. Propositions are the things we claim, state, assert. Propositions are the kinds of things that can be true or false. They are expressed by declarative sentences. The fundamental unit of reasoning is the argument, which is a set of propositions, one of which, the conclusion, is (supposed to be) supported by the others, the premises.
- 1.3: Recognizing and Explicating Arguments
- We need to develop some preliminary analytical skills. The first of these is, simply, the ability to recognize arguments when we see them, and to figure out what the conclusion is (and what the premises are). What we want to learn first is how to explicate arguments. This involves writing down a bunch of declarative sentences that express the propositions in the argument, and clearly marking which of these sentences expresses the conclusion.
- 1.4: Deductive and Inductive Arguments
- As we noted earlier, there are different logics—different approaches to distinguishing good arguments from bad ones. One of the reasons we need different logics is that there are different kinds of arguments. In this section, we distinguish two types: deductive and inductive arguments.
- 1.5: Diagramming Arguments
- What we haven’t explored is the question of just how the premises in a given argument do that job—how they work together to support the conclusion, what kinds of relationships they have with one another. This is a deeper level of analysis than merely distinguishing the premises from the conclusion; it will require a mode of presentation more elaborate than a list of propositions with the bottom one separated from the others by a horizontal line.
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