SF/0112 - FILOSOFIA DELLA SCIENZA

Academic Year 2020/2021

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Objectives

1. KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS 'UNDERSTANDING:
learning the basic notions of philosophy of science, logic and theory of argumentation.

2.APPLYING KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING:
students should be able to recognize the main formal structures of the natural language and to ascertain whether an argument is correct.

3. MAKING JUDGEMENTS:
the course aims to encourage students to formulate personal and correct arguments in different fields of knowledge.

4. COMMUNICATION SKILLS:
students should be able to properly and correctly express what they have learned

5. LEARNING SKILLS:
students should acquire some key logical concepts in order to improve their learning and comprehension of notions and concepts in different fields.

Prerequisites

No particular pre-requisities are needed. However, it is desiderable to have some basic skills in logic and mathematics.

Contents

The course will be delivered in the first semester. It concerns some basic notions of classical sentential logic and some basic concepts of argumentation theory.
In particular, the following topics will be covered: 0) historical and philosophical origin of logic; a) what is a sentence; b) the logical connectives: truth-tables, logical truths, quantifiers, the square of opposition, natural language vs. formal languages;
c) the main fallacies; d) decision making; e) analogical reasoning; f) statistical reasoning; e) foundations of quantum mechanics

Teaching Methods

The course consists in 10 lessons, 3 hours per lessons. Exercises and lessons will be considered alternatively along all the course.

Verification of learning

Written or oral final exam.
- Criteria for the attribution of the marks in the final exam.
Written exam:
descriptive and argumentative abilities;
syntactically correct writing and appropriate terminology;
structuring of the written text;
knowledge of the concepts covered and ability to critically elaborate on them.
Oral exam:
speaking ability,
ability to focus on the subject,
knowledge of the conce

Texts

Support documents include lecture notes, exercises, selected papers and videos, etc. These materials can be found in the course section of the e-learning facilities of the University of Cagliari.
Erasmus students are invited to address to the teacher for any information.
Testo: G. Tindale "Fallacies and Argument Appraisal" Cambridge University Press 2007.
If requested, foreign students attending the course (e.g., Erasmus students) can be provided alternative references in English. In this case their knowledge will be tested in English.

More Information

Support documents include lecture notes, exercises, selected papers and videos, etc. These materials can be found in the course section of the e-learning facilities of the University of Cagliari.
Erasmus students are invited to address to the teacher for any information. English program is available for foreign students.