Logic and Philosophy of Science
Module Code: PI2006
Module Name: Logic and Philosophy of Science
- ECTS Weighting: 15
- Semester/Term Taught: Michaelmas + Hilary Term
- Contact Hours: 44 hours of lecture and 11 hours of tutorial
- Module Personnel: Lecturers – Paal Antonsen, Dr. Niall Connolly
Learning Outcomes
Having successfully completed this module, students will be able to:
- translate sentences from natural language into a formal language;
- employ methods for checking validity in propositional and predicate logic;
- apply formal techniques to some philosophical issues;
- demonstrate understnading of the core topics and issues in the philosophy of science.
Module Content
This course introduces the elements of formal logic including the propositional and predicate calculi and basic proof procedures. It also deals with issues in the philosophy of the natural and social sciences.
Components 1 and 2: Formal Logic – Paal Antonsen
'Either Abel murdered Cain or Cain murdered Abel. No one murdered Cain. Therefore, Cain murdered Abel'. Most people would agree that this is an example of a valid argument. You probably do too – but why? What makes an argument a valid argument (or an invalid one)? In this course we will make use of formal logic to gain some clarity on how to assess the validity of arguments, and precisifying argument in natural language so that they can be evaluated. We will learn how to translate sentences in natural language into a formal language, and learn methods of checking validity.
The course is divided into three sections:
- Propositional logic: we introduce a simple formal language that allows us to handle complete sentences and connectives that bind them together. We then make use of truth tables to represent the truth conditions of complex formulas, and a tree method to more easily check the validity of arguments.
- Predicate logic: we expand our formal language to talk about names, relations and properties, as well as quantifying over individuals. We then make use of some simple model theory to represent the truth conditions of formulas in this language, and expand our tree method as well to handle arguments in the expanded language.
- Philosophical logic: lastly we consider some applications of formal methods in philosophical reasoning. We consider how to handle talk about the future, vagueness, things that don't exist and justification of logic.
Together these three sections provide an introduction to classical logic and how one might go about handling issues in philosophy in a more formal manner.
Components 3 and 4: Philosophy of Science – Dr. Niall Connolly
This course will subject the aims and methods of science to philosophical analysis; the basic question we want to answer is: what is science? We will start by asking whether scientific theories and the practice of science have distinctive features which allow us to draw a clear distinction between science and other human enterprises. It has been felt that a 'demarcation criterion' is particularly important for disqualifying as real science 'pseudo science', like Creationism and Homeopathy. We will examine some alleged demarcation criteria. It is difficult to come up with a demarcation criterion or an exact definition of science but there are some things that are clearly true of science: science seeks to explain natural events, and to formulate laws of nature. We will ask what it is to explain a natural event; and what is a law of nature? We will also investigate the general aim of science. Does science attempt to give a true account of the world; or just a useful or 'empircally adequate' account? A related question is whether scientific theories are committed to the existence of the unobservable entities they posit. Science, it is often claimed, aims for an objective view of the world and this aim is facilitated by its methods. Feminist philosophers of science have subjected the notion of objectivity and the claim that science is objective to critical scrutiny; we will examine this critique.
Assessment Details
Students will be required to complete logic exercises, take a logic test and submit one essay for this course, comprising 50% of the overall grade. The annual examination accounts for 50% of the overall grade.