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by lkbm 2071 days ago
Modus tollens. It was also covered in both CS (explicitly in Discrete Math) and Philosophy (explicitly in Intro to Logic, and implicitly in many others) at my school in the US.

It seems like the question in the article doesn't really make it clear that you're supposed to answer about the relation between the two. It could easily be interpreted as a question about the truth value of each.

It's definitely true that some people don't think in terms of formal logic and wouldn't know this anyway (this is why we have affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent as common examples of bad logic), but I don't think the question as stated demonstrates that of them.

EDIT: Just remembered it being explicitly explained in Intro to Philosophy and/or Professional Ethics as well.

1 comments

One amusing thing I saw in the two courses I mentioned is that in Intro to Logic, we spent something like a month learning each of the eighteen rules of inference, gradually adding a couple each day until we were familiar with all of them.

In Discrete Math, the professor wrote out the eighteen rules in as part of a single lecture and then we had homework due that same week wherein we were expected to know and use all of them. (He may have introduced predicate logic in that same lecture.)

Intro to Logic was a philosophy course, but some majors allowed students to take it instead of their one required College Algebra course. The result was it was a lot of very non-technical people who struggled with intro algebra, and consequently struggled with formal logic. (Predicate logic was the focus of the third section of the course later on.)

Discrete Mathematical Structures was a math/cs course, where almost every student was a CS major, so it was predominantly technically-minded people for whom formal logic was at least very familiar, if not natural.