"Logic is part of our shared language and inheritance."
- Ted Sider
I am really pumped about the next season of the podcast. I have just started scheduling episodes, and so far I have a musician/podcaster, a philosopher at UNC, a scholar specializing in the second century, and a journalist. More to come. Subscribe here 👈🏻
In honor of Prime Day, I just launched the biggest sale I’ve ever put on for my Introduction to Logic course: a $4.99/month subscription for the full course. Get it here. You will learn how the basic logical symbols work, how to build and interpret truth tables, and you’ll learn the major formal argument forms, and how to do proofs.
Now that I’m on the other side of learning logic proofs, I think of them as a fun challenge. A lot of students tel me they like the puzzle-like aspect of proofs. But that wasn’t the case for me initially. My initial reaction to learning proofs was cold, stunned panic. That might seem like the worst sales pitch anyone could make for their own course, but hang with me.
Picture me as naïve, wide-eyed, nervous but excited, before my first day of my first semester as a PhD student.
Part of the responsibility of being a graduate student involves teaching assistant duties for large classes, and at Texas A&M the options were: 1) assist an Engineering Ethics course, alongside other grad students, a Philosophy professor, and an Engineering professor, or 2) assist an Introduction to Logic course with a couple other grad students and a Philosophy professor.
In my mind, I was obviously going to be a TA for Engineering Ethics, because I had practically no background in formal deductive logic. I had taken a logic class in college, but it barely covered the basics.
A couple days before the semester kicks off, I get an email that says I and my (eventual) friend Sean need to meet in Dr. Kenny Easwaran’s office to go over our TA responsibilities for…Intro to Logic.
Sheer panic. (Easwaran was a world-renowned philosopher and mathematical logician, featured in a Netflix documentary about infinity.)
I remember my first thought very clearly: “I have moved my family across the country, and this will be my downfall for the entire program, and my career, and the rest of my life will be filled with shame for failing at this level.”
I barely knew any logic at all, and I was expected to teach it at the college level??
So we had the meeting, I panicked a little more, and then I went to the first class where I was a TA, sitting in the back of the class, looking out at almost 300 students in a large hall who, I was convinced, were all looking at me thinking, “This guy doesn’t look like he knows logic”. I knew they could just smell the incompetence on me.
But necessity and pragmatics eventually took over, so while I was taking my first PhD seminars on metaethics, Kant, and the history of logic (which is its own story of confusion and inadequacy), I committed to incremental learning and a mastery of each logical step, learning along with the students I was teaching. I only had to be one day ahead of them, so I relentlessly practiced every problem before I had it down.
Until one night when I stared at a proof for literally a couple hours, and just couldn’t get it. Here was the dilemma:
I thought I had tried everything, and I was doing the same thing over and over. If I didn’t have the answer, I couldn’t teach the problem to all my waiting students the next day. But if I emailed one of the other TA’s, they would find out I was a logic imposter who had no idea what I was doing.
I had to teach that proof, so I emailed the senior logic TA, and she was very nice about explaining the proof steps, which made complete sense once I saw them. (Note: it is common and even expected to ask for help when learning logic.)
By the end of the semester, I got the hang of it, and learning logic became one of my favorite parts of the program. By the next year, I was teaching my own college course for the first time—Introduction to Logic—to a room full of great students with encouraging feedback.
Part of what made it fun was what I initially feared the most: the degree of difficulty. But the meta-lessons you learn from a difficult logic problem translate to the real world: take problems one incremental step at a time, pay attention to every detail, don’t move on to the next step until you have carefully completed the step before, make sure you’re looking at all the tools you need to solve the problem.
If you have been on the fence, wondering whether you’re capable of getting the basics of formal logic, I’m telling you that you can. I have taught enough students to say that with confidence.
And you will have the added bonus of learning with low stakes, and almost certainly won’t have the thought of, “If I don’t get this proof, I will need to pack up and move somewhere where no one will remember my shame”.
So you have that going for you.
Take the step.
Until next time.
Jared
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This Week's Free Philosophy Resource:
Title: On feeling relieved that something is over
Author: Giovanni Merlo
Reading Level: Graduate
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