INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC

General Information
Karanfil Soyhun
Office: JF 506
Phone: 359 6558

Office Hours: To be announced during the first classes.

e-mail: soyhunka@boun.edu.tr

Description
This course is an introduction to logic, requiring no prior knowledge of philosophy or
mathematics. It will teach you to recognise and construct correct deductions. The subjects
will include sentential calculus and quantifier calculus.

Text Book:
First 3 chapters of D. Kalish, R. Montegue. Logic Techniques of Formal Reasoning. 2nd ed.
San Diego. 1980 (You may find a copy of it at the Hisar Photocopier, behind the Hisarustu bus
stop and at the Book Store Photocopier.)

Assesment:
Attendence
Attendence is both required and strongly recommended.
Exams
This term I will be giving 4 exams. The exam dates are below. My philosophy of education
can be summarized as following. Teach what you want students to learn from the subject,
and test how well they learned the material. This means no surprizes. Exam questions are
exactly like what I said they will be. This means the book, and the study guides are all you
need for a good grade. There are no other sources. Your book is still the best there is on the
subject.

 1st Exam October 16th (10%)

 2nd Exam November 13th(20%)
 3rd Exam December 4th (20%)
4th Exam is the final. The date will be announced later. (50% )
Overview of the Class
Week 1 -3
We will study a simple sentential calculus, called “the language of conditionals and
negation”, or shortened to CN by our book. This will allow us to start formulating concepts
like validity, syntax, and semantics. We will provide translations of natural language
arguments to CN, and show whether they are valid or not. You will find my slides, as well as
a study guide in Moodle. Best way to study for the first exam is todo all the examples of the
book. You really do not need anything else.

Week 4 - 6
We will study a more complex version of sentential calculus, SN. This will allow us to get a
better understanding of validity, syntax, and semantics. Again we will provide translations of
natural language arguments to CN, and show whether they are valid or not. However, things
get more complicated with chapter 2. SN allows us to capture more of the everyday
arguments than CN. We will also learn the method for proving when invalidty.
Again,
You will find my slides, as well as a study guide in Moodle. Best way to study for the first
exam is todo all the examples of the book. You really do not need anything else.

Week 7- 8
We will start with the propositional calculus, PC. Since this is a major change from the
previous 2 chapters, we will have an initial introduction for PC, learn to formulate
grammatical sentences, and translation, then have an exam on these topics.

Weeks 9 - 12
We will expand our study of the propositional calculus, PC. We will continue to study more
complex translations, but also develop methods to prove validity of arguments in PC. As well
as developing methods for invalidity proofs. The last exam will include all of the chapter 3. As
usual, you will find both the slides, and a study guide for the exam in Moodle.