You have the option of writing a paper for the course. If you choose this option, your grade on the paper will replace your lowest exam grade (not including the final exam). (In the unlikely event that the paper grade is lower than the lowest exam grade, I will not make the substitution.)
Mechanical details: The paper should be approximately 8-10 pages in length, double-spaced in a reasonably-sized font (e.g. 12 pt. Times New Roman) with one-inch margins.
Content: The general idea of the paper is to either (a) make use of symbolic logic to analyze and evaluate some argumentation in a field you are interested in, or (b) to explain and discuss how it has been applied by others in an area of interest. For most students, the best strategy will be (a). In that case, your paper should do the following:
In the literature of a discipline you are interested in, do the following:
If you are a pre-law student, you might consider, instead of writing about an article or chapter, doing the following. Take one or two of the setups for the analytical reasoning section (sometimes informally called the "logic games" section) of an LSAT sample exam. Use logical symbols to represent the constraints given in the setup, and then solve the questions associated with that setup. Write up your answers, explaining the reasoning that led to them, and then spend a page or two reflecting on which questions or aspects of the questions your knowledge of logic helped with, which questions or aspects of questions it didn't help with, and why. (Some of the LSAT questions lend themselves to symbolic formulation better than others. If you discuss only one setup, you should try your best to find one to which symbolic logic is well suited. If you discuss more than one, it might be interesting to contrast one that has a simple and natural formalization with another that does not seem to.)
The grade will be based on the appropriateness of the article or chapter (or LSAT question) you have selected; how well you have interpreted the argument(s) you discuss; how sophisticated and appropriate your formalization of the argument is; and how successfully you evaluate the argument. Of course general criteria of good writing will also be relevant, including the clarity of your writing and the organization of the paper.
If you are interested in an area in which symbolic logic has been extensively used (for example, philosophy or computer science), you may want to choose option (b), explaining and discussing one way logic has been used in your discipline. For example:
Philosophy students: You could find and discuss a philosophical article that uses symbolic formulations of arguments. This could be a contemporary article on a particular philosophical question, but it might be more interesting to take as your focus a critical discussion of a historical philosopher that uses symbolic notation to explicate his or her arguments. Your essay could then not only explain the symbolic formulation, but also address to what extent you think it is helpful or unhelpful in understanding the work of the philosopher under discussion.
Computer Science students: Depending on your interests, you might write about the the relation between logic and database query languages such as SQL, the role of logic in AI, its use in proofs of software correctness, or the relation between Boolean logic and chip design. An excellent overview of a lot of connections is Halpern et al., "On the Unusual Effectiveness of Logic in Computer Science," Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 7 (2001): 213-236. (You can find this online in either pdf format or PostScript.)
Last update:
March 12, 2008. |