My experience suggests that some formal logic is very valuable, if only in showing both the teacher and the students that there is a powerful body of work out there for when they want to take CT to the next level. It also helps to ground CT, which can sometimes appear to be a non-subject, because relatively unstructured reasoning is a natural activity that almost everyone engages in.
You can overdo it, though. I had a straight-up formal logic course in college, taught by a mathematician, and it took me some years to figure out what it had to do with philosophy (quite a bit, it turns out, but it was far from obvious how to make use of it).
Perhaps the question is analogous to "How much mathematics should there be in a Sociology course?" A good bit, surely, if it's a serious course, but it shouldn't overwhelm the fact that sociology is about, well, people.
My experience suggests that some formal logic is very valuable, if only in showing both the teacher and the students that there is a powerful body of work out there for when they want to take CT to the next level. It also helps to ground CT, which can sometimes appear to be a non-subject, because relatively unstructured reasoning is a natural activity that almost everyone engages in.
ReplyDeleteYou can overdo it, though. I had a straight-up formal logic course in college, taught by a mathematician, and it took me some years to figure out what it had to do with philosophy (quite a bit, it turns out, but it was far from obvious how to make use of it).
Perhaps the question is analogous to "How much mathematics should there be in a Sociology course?" A good bit, surely, if it's a serious course, but it shouldn't overwhelm the fact that sociology is about, well, people.