What I Wish I Knew About Logic Before Taking a Logic Class

This course is titled "Basic Concepts in Propositional Logic: All the Logic You Need to Know for Critical Thinking".

The videos in this course cover exactly what the title suggests. You don't need to know a ton of logic to be a good critical thinker. In fact, a lot of formal logic is largely irrelevant to critical thinking.

However, formal logic is still very interesting from a philosophical perspective, and it's extremely relevant in various fields of mathematics, linguists and computer science.

This set of lectures is text-based. I wrote this in response to a question I received about the relevance of logic to the study of natural languages.

I realized that the response I was writing was also a statement of what I think everyone should know about logic, or at least have in their heads as a touchpoint for later reference, before they start wading into a symbolic logic course for the first time.

In what follows I present what I wish someone had told me, early in my undergraduate career. It would have saved me a lot of confusing and avoided misconceptions that took years for me to undo.

I hope you find it helpful. Please leave any questions or comments you may have in the comment threads.

But if you want to get right to the content on propositional logic, feel free to just skip ahead! You can always come back to this later.