I taught introduction to formal logic at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in fall 2014 and spring 2015. My first semester, I used Virginia Klenk's Understanding Symbolic Logic, which was the text used by the other instructors—in fact, there was a custom edition of the text published for UWM's use. In my second semester, however, after student's voiced a concern over textbook prices and how much we would use the text, I ditched the textbook and instead wrote my own course materials and homework. I followed Klenk in utilizing a natural deduction Fitch-style language.
The following is the general outline of topics we discussed each week in spring 2015.
- Week 1: Deductive arguments and formal languages
- Week 2: Truth tables, truth-value computations, and translations into a formal language
- Week 3: Argument validity and related concepts
- Week 4: Continued
- Week 5: Inference rules and proofs
- Week 6: Continue working with proofs
- Week 7: Replacement rules
- Week 8: Continue working with proofs
- Week 9: Quantification
- Week 10: Continued
- Week 11: Inference and replacement rules with quantification
- Week 12: Continue working with proofs