The Discovery of Deduction (Student Edition)

The Discovery of Deduction: An Introduction to Formal Logic will welcome your students into the fascinating realm of formal, deductive logic. This text teaches students how an argument is put together—the form or structure of an argument. It pulls back the curtain to show students not only how arguments work, but also how to assess what’s going on in their own minds. The Discovery of Deduction is recommended for students who have studied informal fallacies, such as those taught in The Art of Argument: An Introduction to the Informal Fallacies; however, the text does also stand on its own as an independent study of formal logic.

The Discovery of Deduction (Student Edition) makes a subject usually reserved for study in college accessible and relevant to logic-stage students, who are at an age when they are beginning to engage with important ideas. This text emphasizes the practical and real-world application of soundly structured deductive logic. Using methods such as Socratic dialogue, ample discussion, and integration of other subjects, the text approaches formal logic in the ideal way for dialectic students. Starting with a short history of Aristotelian logic, students move from there to learning how to translate arguments from ordinary, conversational, or written narratives into categorical form. Students then build on those skills as they study how to construct syllogisms and test them for validity. As a part of this process, they study the square of opposition and relationships of equivalence, learning how to make valid propositional inferences and analyze syllogisms.

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