Intro Logic Examples
At Leeds this year one of the things I’m teaching is first year intro logic. I’ve taught most of the material before and my experience is always the same. The students fall into roughly two types.
Type A
Some students love it straight away, and ask interesting questions right off the bat. Some students (typically those with mathematics backgrounds) breeze through the early material, although they do find it dull. Let’s generalise and call these Type A Students.
Type B
And many students find it terrifying, at least at first. They typically have not enjoyed mathematics at school, and find symbols off putting. They are used to writing essays. They struggle to see how logic is relevant to the kind of philosophy (often ethics) they came to university to do. They often say they would drop the course if they possibly could (for undergraduate joint or single honours philosophy programmes in the UK these modules are typically required modules). Let’s generalise and call these Type B Students. Women are over represented in Type B students.
If they’re prepared to put in the effort, Type B normally pass the module (to their surprise!) and some start to enjoy it. I enjoy teaching Type Bs. It’s probably my favourite part of teaching intro logic: helping to install confidence and sometimes excitement to students who start out intimidated, bored, and scared they will fail.
The first few weeks of intro logic classes are mostly about juggling the needs of Type A and Type B students, and I have several strategies for this (more later on this perhaps). One of my main teaching goals for early on in Intro Logic classes is motivating Type Bs.
At Leeds, I’m required to work through the examples in a textbook (Bowell and Kemp), and I can see that this book is trying to motivate students who might otherwise not see the relevance of the module to their own interests (ie lots of Type Bs) with their use of examples.
Here are two I taught this term:
I’m guessing, but I suspect that the use of these examples (as opposed to more mundane ones) is intended to hook in the student who is scared, or doesn’t see the relevance of logic to themselves. ‘Oh’, this student is supposed to think, ‘I can see that intro logic can be applied in to the debates I care about’. Or they recognise an argument they’ve encountered before and that helps the idea to ‘click’.
But I do worry about the examples and language used. I can easily imagine a student who is disadvantaged due to their identity (say, along race or gender or sexuality lines) and who doesn’t want to think about the arguments above during logic class. After all, they may be sick of encountering such arguments, sick of thinking about such arguments. They might turn up to logic class and simply want to think about logic, not gender or sexuality *yet again*. Notice that students with minority identities might be Type A or B students. Imagine a Type A student who is queer, who doesn’t want to think about HIV status and the link to guessing someone’s sexuality during logic: they just want to ask their interesting question about validity.
So I worry about the Bowell and Kemp examples, even though I can see why they are using them.
At Leeds what I did was try to soften the impact of the HIV+ example, in the following ways;
*when going through the example, I asked the students to imagine it was 1983 and they were doctors. I then said
“The AIDS crisis in America has just begun. There are two epicentres: San Francisco and New York. You work at a hospital in San Francisco, and are seeing more and more new cases everyday. You don’t yet know what the cause of AIDS/HIV is. You know there is some link between AIDS/HIV and sexuality but you are not sure if this is a causal link, or there is some common lifestyle factor(s). You are worried about the cause of AIDS, and are trying to figure out what exactly the link might be. You have a very sick AIDS patient on your ward, Mr X. You know the following things:
1. Most American male patients whose blood tests HIV+ are queer
2. Most American male patients who live in The OC are not queer
3. Your patient is HIV+ and from The OC
Do you have an inductive argument to believe that Mr X is queer? How about one for Mr X being not queer?”
*I modelled the language “queer” rather than “is a homosexual” during the whole class, and most students followed suit (although I did not correct them if they used the language in the textbook)
One question I have been thinking about: Is there anything else I could have/should have done at Leeds this week?
And more a more general question: in what ways should we use examples early on in Intro Logic? It’s good to motivate students with examples they recognise and feel a connection to, especially Type Bs. And some students with minority identities (both As and Bs) may enjoy seeing the relevance of philosophy to their life. But on the other hand, students may want a space to think simply about logic, and not confront painful arguments once again.
My tentative idea is to try and find engaging examples which don’t involve arguments which are likely to be triggers for minority students. So for example, perhaps arguments about the death penalty or vegetarianism.
But I’m still thinking hard.
Type A
Some students love it straight away, and ask interesting questions right off the bat. Some students (typically those with mathematics backgrounds) breeze through the early material, although they do find it dull. Let’s generalise and call these Type A Students.
Type B
And many students find it terrifying, at least at first. They typically have not enjoyed mathematics at school, and find symbols off putting. They are used to writing essays. They struggle to see how logic is relevant to the kind of philosophy (often ethics) they came to university to do. They often say they would drop the course if they possibly could (for undergraduate joint or single honours philosophy programmes in the UK these modules are typically required modules). Let’s generalise and call these Type B Students. Women are over represented in Type B students.
If they’re prepared to put in the effort, Type B normally pass the module (to their surprise!) and some start to enjoy it. I enjoy teaching Type Bs. It’s probably my favourite part of teaching intro logic: helping to install confidence and sometimes excitement to students who start out intimidated, bored, and scared they will fail.
The first few weeks of intro logic classes are mostly about juggling the needs of Type A and Type B students, and I have several strategies for this (more later on this perhaps). One of my main teaching goals for early on in Intro Logic classes is motivating Type Bs.
At Leeds, I’m required to work through the examples in a textbook (Bowell and Kemp), and I can see that this book is trying to motivate students who might otherwise not see the relevance of the module to their own interests (ie lots of Type Bs) with their use of examples.
Here are two I taught this term:
I’m guessing, but I suspect that the use of these examples (as opposed to more mundane ones) is intended to hook in the student who is scared, or doesn’t see the relevance of logic to themselves. ‘Oh’, this student is supposed to think, ‘I can see that intro logic can be applied in to the debates I care about’. Or they recognise an argument they’ve encountered before and that helps the idea to ‘click’.
But I do worry about the examples and language used. I can easily imagine a student who is disadvantaged due to their identity (say, along race or gender or sexuality lines) and who doesn’t want to think about the arguments above during logic class. After all, they may be sick of encountering such arguments, sick of thinking about such arguments. They might turn up to logic class and simply want to think about logic, not gender or sexuality *yet again*. Notice that students with minority identities might be Type A or B students. Imagine a Type A student who is queer, who doesn’t want to think about HIV status and the link to guessing someone’s sexuality during logic: they just want to ask their interesting question about validity.
So I worry about the Bowell and Kemp examples, even though I can see why they are using them.
At Leeds what I did was try to soften the impact of the HIV+ example, in the following ways;
*when going through the example, I asked the students to imagine it was 1983 and they were doctors. I then said
“The AIDS crisis in America has just begun. There are two epicentres: San Francisco and New York. You work at a hospital in San Francisco, and are seeing more and more new cases everyday. You don’t yet know what the cause of AIDS/HIV is. You know there is some link between AIDS/HIV and sexuality but you are not sure if this is a causal link, or there is some common lifestyle factor(s). You are worried about the cause of AIDS, and are trying to figure out what exactly the link might be. You have a very sick AIDS patient on your ward, Mr X. You know the following things:
1. Most American male patients whose blood tests HIV+ are queer
2. Most American male patients who live in The OC are not queer
3. Your patient is HIV+ and from The OC
Do you have an inductive argument to believe that Mr X is queer? How about one for Mr X being not queer?”
*I modelled the language “queer” rather than “is a homosexual” during the whole class, and most students followed suit (although I did not correct them if they used the language in the textbook)
One question I have been thinking about: Is there anything else I could have/should have done at Leeds this week?
And more a more general question: in what ways should we use examples early on in Intro Logic? It’s good to motivate students with examples they recognise and feel a connection to, especially Type Bs. And some students with minority identities (both As and Bs) may enjoy seeing the relevance of philosophy to their life. But on the other hand, students may want a space to think simply about logic, and not confront painful arguments once again.
My tentative idea is to try and find engaging examples which don’t involve arguments which are likely to be triggers for minority students. So for example, perhaps arguments about the death penalty or vegetarianism.
But I’m still thinking hard.
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