This book is designed to engage students' interest and promote their writing abilities while teaching them to think critically and creatively. Dowden takes an activist stance on critical thinking, asking students to create and revise arguments rather than simply recognizing and criticizing them. His book emphasizes inductive reasoning and the analysis of individual claims in the beginning, leaving deductive arguments for consideration later in the course.
Some of our earliest experiences of the conclusive force of an argument come from school mathematics: faced with a mathematical proof, we cannot deny the conclusion once the premises have been accepted. Behind such arguments lies a more general pattern of 'demonstrative arguments' that is studied in the science of logic. Logical reasoning is applied at all levels, from everyday life to advanced sciences, and a remarkable level of complexity is achieved in everyday logical reasoning, even if the principles behind it remain intuitive. Jan von Plato provides an accessible but rigorous introduction to an important aspect of contemporary logic: its deductive machinery. He shows that when the forms of logical reasoning are analysed, it turns out that a limited set of first principles can represent any logical argument. His book will be valuable for students of logic, mathematics and computer science.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was an American philosopher, physicist, mathematician and founder of pragmatism. This book provides readers with philosopher's only known, complete account of his own work. It comprises a series of lectures given in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1898.
Students learn logic by practicing it by working through problems, analyzing existing arguments, and constructing their own arguments in plain language and symbolic notation. The Art of Reasoning not only introduces the principles of critical thinking and logic in a clear, accessible, and logical manner thus practicing what it preaches but it also provides ample opportunity for students to hone their skills and master course content.
Information technology has lead to an increasing need to present information visually. This volume addresses the logical aspects of the visualization of information. Properties of diagrams, charts and maps are explored and their use in problem solving and
Concise text begins with overview of elementary mathematical concepts and outlines theory of Boolean algebras; defines operators for elimination, division, and expansion; covers syllogistic reasoning, solution of Boolean equations, functional deduction. 1990 edition.
This book contains a selection of the papers presented at the Logic, Reasoning and Rationality 2010 conference (LRR10) in Ghent. The conference aimed at stimulating the use of formal frameworks to explicate concrete cases of human reasoning, and conversely, to challenge scholars in formal studies by presenting them with interesting new cases of actual reasoning. According to the members of the Wiener Kreis, there was a strong connection between logic, reasoning, and rationality and that human reasoning is rational in so far as it is based on (classical) logic. Later, this belief came under attack and logic was deemed inadequate to explicate actual cases of human reasoning. Today, there is a growing interest in reconnecting logic, reasoning and rationality. A central motor for this change was the development of non-classical logics and non-classical formal frameworks. The book contains contributions in various non-classical formal frameworks, case studies that enhance our apprehension of concrete reasoning patterns, and studies of the philosophical implications for our understanding of the notions of rationality.
Written in a clear, precise and user-friendly style, Logic as a Tool: A Guide to Formal Logical Reasoning is intended for undergraduates in both mathematics and computer science, and will guide them to learn, understand and master the use of classical logic as a tool for doing correct reasoning. It offers a systematic and precise exposition of classical logic with many examples and exercises, and only the necessary minimum of theory. The book explains the grammar, semantics and use of classical logical languages and teaches the reader how grasp the meaning and translate them to and from natural language. It illustrates with extensive examples the use of the most popular deductive systems -- axiomatic systems, semantic tableaux, natural deduction, and resolution -- for formalising and automating logical reasoning both on propositional and on first-order level, and provides the reader with technical skills needed for practical derivations in them. Systematic guidelines are offered on how to perform logically correct and well-structured reasoning using these deductive systems and the reasoning techniques that they employ. •Concise and systematic exposition, with semi-formal but rigorous treatment of the minimum necessary theory, amply illustrated with examples •Emphasis both on conceptual understanding and on developing practical skills •Solid and balanced coverage of syntactic, semantic, and deductive aspects of logic •Includes extensive sets of exercises, many of them provided with solutions or answers •Supplemented by a website including detailed slides, additional exercises and solutions For more information browse the book's website at: https://logicasatool.wordpress.com
This is the first comprehensive treatment of subjective logic and all its operations. The author developed the approach, and in this book he first explains subjective opinions, opinion representation, and decision-making under vagueness and uncertainty, and he then offers a full definition of subjective logic, harmonising the key notations and formalisms, concluding with chapters on trust networks and subjective Bayesian networks, which when combined form general subjective networks. The author shows how real-world situations can be realistically modelled with regard to how situations are perceived, with conclusions that more correctly reflect the ignorance and uncertainties that result from partially uncertain input arguments. The book will help researchers and practitioners to advance, improve and apply subjective logic to build powerful artificial reasoning models and tools for solving real-world problems. A good grounding in discrete mathematics is a prerequisite.
