BASS Social Anthropology and Philosophy / Course details

The course will cover the syntax and semantics of a propositional logic PL. Next, a natural deduction system will be introduced for proving the validity of sequents and theorems in PL. Subsequently the course will extend the grammar and proof procedure developed for PL to encompass a language of first-order predicate logic with identity, QL.

Introduce students to the elements of formal propositional and first-order predicate logic. The course will introduce two systems of logic and provide a proof-procedure for each.

There will be a mixture of lectures and tutorials.

Please note the information in scheduled activity hours are only a guidance and may change.

• Identify and construct wffs of PL and QL by implementing rules of generative grammar
• Prove sequents/theorems of PL & QL
• Translate English sentences, including with definite descriptions, into QL

• Understand the basic idea of a proof-theoretic approach to formal logic
• Understand and reflect on the relationship between natural and formal languages

• Prove theorems in PL and QL
• Identify logical structures in natural language constructions

• Apply abstract reasoning
• Apply problem solving

The School of Social Sciences (SoSS) is committed to providing timely and appropriate feedback to students on their academic progress and achievement, thereby enabling students to reflect on their progress and plan their academic and skills development effectively. Students are reminded that feedback is necessarily responsive: only when a student has done a certain amount of work and approaches us with it at the appropriate fora is it possible for us to feed back on the student's work. The main forms of feedback on this course are written feedback responses and exam answers.

We also draw your attention to the variety of generic forms of feedback available to you on this as on all SoSS courses. These include: meeting the lecturer/tutor during their office hours; e-mailing questions to the lecturer/tutor; asking questions from the lecturer (before and after lecture); presenting a question on the discussion board on Blackboard; and obtaining feedback from your peers during tutorials.

The following reading list is indicative, and students are not required to read all the publications listed.

Logic: A Very Short Introduction, Graham Priest, Routledge, 2000