| Course Number | Phil 455.001 (spring 2024) |
| Title | Symbolic Logic |
| Credit Hours | 3 credits |
| Course Description | See below |
| Prerequisites | Phil 155, or permission of the instructor |
| Target Audience | Graduate students in Philosophy, and others with comparable preparation and instructor’s permission |
| Class Times and Location | Mon Wed 11:15 – 12:30 in Caldwell (CW) 208 |
| Instructional Format | In-person, mix of lectures and tutorials/group problem-solving |
| Instructor | Professor Jim Pryor (he/him), email jimpryor@unc.edu |
| Teaching Assistants | None |
| Course Website | http://phil455.jimpryor.net |
| Instructor’s Office Hours | Mon 3–4:30 and Wed 1:30–3 in Caldwell 108A, or by appointment |
| Course Texts | Readings provided by web links |
UNC students enrolled in the course (or otherwise authorized by the instructor) can access the Canvas site.
Those pages include the Zoom links for any course meetings you need to attend remotely, and for my office hours. These can also be retrieved from this restricted page.
Most of the information for the course will be published here, outside of the Canvas system, and can also be viewed by people not enrolled in the course.
This front web page won’t be updated frequently. Regular announcements, readings, and lecture notes will be posted at this page instead.
This course aims to provide solid foundations to deal with reading and writing papers that deal with logic in philosophy and related disciplines. We will cover a range of issues in logic and metalogic, and some in math and formal semantics. Our emphasis will be equipping you with a broad understanding of the field, rather than refining your proof skills. Important metalogical results we discuss include the completeness, compactness, and undecidability of first-order predicate logic.
The course is offered by Professor Jim Pryor (he/him). Undergrads generally address me as “Professor Pryor,” and grad students address me as “Jim.”
Professor Pryor’s office is Caldwell 108A. He can best be reached by email, at jimpryor@unc.edu.
Professor Pryor’s office hours are on Mondays from 3–4:30 and Wednesdays from 1:30–3. (On both days, I can sometimes go later. If you have a quick question, you can also ask just after class.) If you’re unable to meet in person or at these times, we can also arrange to meet by Zoom. The Zoom link for office hours can be found on this restricted page.
Feel free to drop into office hours to discuss anything you like about our course. I’m happy to talk about your homeworks, continue discussion, and so on. If you do come to my office and I’m already speaking with someone, make sure that we know that you’re waiting for us to finish.
This course is aimed at grads and undergrads in Philosophy, Linguistics, and related disciplines like Math and Computer Science.
As stated in the catalog listing, it’s expected that you have taken Phil 155 or its equivalent. Understanding that material well will be essential for being able to keep up with this course.
Goals for the course include:
All our philosophy courses aim at the acquisition and nurturing of basic philosophic skills. One of the main goals of our philosophy curriculum is to instill and enable the development of skills that are distinct to philosophy, but which are foundational to all forms of knowledge.
These basic philosophical skills involve being able to:
In addition, this course satisfies our logic and philosophy of science requirement for the philosophy major and minor and thereby aims at developing the following learning outcomes:
This course satisfies the Quantitative Reasoning Focus Capacity (FC-QUANT).
These courses address questions like these:
As an FC-QUANT course, we will aim at the following learning outcomes:
Every Focus Capacity course includes the following activities:
These elements — referred to as “recurring capacities” — will help you repeatedly practice crucial skills for future study, life, and career success.
All readings for the course will be provided by web links. Some of these are in a restricted section of the course website. The username and password for these will be emailed to you, and also announced in class.
The University says that a 3 credit course should be expected to demand 9–12 hours of work per week on average, including the time for classroom meetings. This course should be in the middle of that range.
It is essential that you attend class meetings consistently. Material not in the readings will often be presented in class, and useful background and framing for many of the readings will also be provided.
The University’s Class Attendance Policy can be found here. In brief, they authorize absences only for some University activities, religious observances, disabilities, significant health conditions including pregnancy, and personal or family emergencies. If these include your situation, then consult these links:
The University Approved Absence Office (UAAO) provides information and FAQs for students related to University Approved Absences.
Students can be excused because of disability, pregnancy, or religious observance, as required by law and approved by Accessibility Resources and Service (ARS) and/or the Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office (EOC).
Students can be excused for significant health conditions (generally, these will require you to miss classes for five or more days) and/or personal/family emergencies, as approved by the Office of the Dean of Students (ODOS), Gender Violence Service Coordinators, and/or the Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office (EOC).
If you need to miss class because of a more temporary illness, just email to let me know. If you need to miss class for other kinds of reasons (like a job interview or to attend a wedding), ask me about it well in advance. If you do miss a class, you will be responsible for catching up with missed content; and permission to miss a class doesn’t excuse you from deadlines for work due before or after the class.
If you need to stay home during any of our class meetings, try to attend the meeting by Zoom instead.
See the Policies section below about using laptops or other devices in class.
When you join our class meetings, you are expected to have read any material assigned for that day, and to be ready to ask questions about it.
It is essential that you ask questions when things in the readings or my presentations are unclear.
As required for IDEAs in Action courses, this course has presentation and collaboration components that are counted towards your participation grade. These will consist in our solving problems as a group in class. When we are doing this, and you don’t understand what’s happening, or why some strategy is or isn’t being used, it is also essential that you ask questions.
Talking through your confusions and lack of understanding is enormously helpful in overcoming them. Your overall participation and engagement with the class, which includes asking questions and contributing to our group problem-solving, will make up 15% of your grade for the course. There are also other ways to be engaged, such as pursuing matters further in office hours.
There will be reading assignments for most class meetings. Sometimes these will be selections from published texts; other times my own webnotes. I’ll often also post summaries of materials I presented in class. You should read these materials carefully when they’re posted, and expect that you’ll have to read many of them more than once.
These resources should be of some use in helping you keep up if you have to miss some class. But you can not rely on everything discussed in class also being summarized online. And you should not expect that the online materials fully make up for attending class meetings, nor for reading assigned texts.
There will be homeworks due most weeks during the semester. There will also be a final homework due on Thursday May 2 at 4 pm, which is the time scheduled for our final exam. Instead of the exam, we will meet at that time to review the final homewok and discuss outstanding philosophical issues that emerged during the semester.
Some of the homework exercises will ask you to define a specified function or predicate (as you might do in a computer programming course). Many will ask you to argue for some conclusion, in a mathematically rigorous way but not in a formal proof system. (Only occasionally will you be asked to prove things in a formal system like first-order logic or extensions of it; instead most of this course will involve reasoning about formal systems.) Some homework exercises will ask you to explain why some mathematical fact does/doesn’t obtain (as an educator or philosopher might, to a student who is stuck or confused). Taken together, the homeworks will constitute (substantially more than) the University requirement of the intellectual equivalent of ten pages of writing.
Homeworks cannot be turned in late, as I’ll be posting sample solutions after you submit them. Your grade for the course will mostly be based on the quality of your homeworks. The weakest two homeworks you submit will be ignored. Ordinarily I’ll expect you to at least attempt every homework; but if emergencies arise you can count a missed/skipped homework as one of the ones to be ignored. Having a lot of work for other courses etc doesn’t qualify as an “emergency” in this sense; and the final homework cannot be skipped.
All students are expected to follow the University Honor Code, which applies to all course assignments and petitions for absences or rescheduling. In brief, this means students are expected to refrain from “lying, cheating, or stealing” in the academic context. For more information or to clarify which actions violate the honor code, consult with your instructors, studentconduct.unc.edu, and/or The Instrument of Student Judicial Governance.
What constitutes “lying, cheating, or stealing” depends on the academic activity.
Your grades for the different components of the course will be weighted as follows:
15% for overall participation/engagement, including questions and group problem-solving in class 10% for final homework (due before our scheduled final exam session on May 2) 75% for regular homeworks during term
Should it be necessary to convert between numeric and letter grades, I assume the following correspondences:
F 0 or 50 D 63.3 and higher D+ 66.7 and higher C- 70.0 and higher C 73.3 and higher C+ 76.7 and higher B- 80.0 and higher B 83.3 and higher B+ 86.7 and higher A- 90.0 and higher A 93.3 and higher
Grade Appeals: If you feel you have been given an incorrect grade for any part of the course, we can review together how I applied the announced standards. If this doesn’t resolve the issue, you have the right to discuss with our department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies (currently Professor Markus Kohl), or to appeal through a formal University process. You’ll be expected to make a case that the grade reflects an arithmetic/clerical error, arbitrariness, discrimination, harassment, or personal malice. To learn more, consult the Academic Advising Program website, or this summary of University policies.
Most requests that I and other professors hear for changing grades are based on how good/bad it would be for a student to get a given grade; but it would be unfair and inappropriate for justifications like that to succeed.
This schedule lists the rough order of our topics. See this other page for course announcements, context for the main readings, links to optional further reading, lecture notes, and any minor tweaks to the schedule. Check that page frequently.
As stated above, homeworks cannot be turned in late, as I’ll be posting sample solutions after you submit them. But your weakest two homeworks won’t negatively affect your grade, and in some circumstances this can include homeworks you failed to submit.
The deadline for the final homework is when our course’s final exam would have taken place, and can be extended only in the special circumstances that you could be excused from an exam. These must be documented and approved by an academic dean.
See the final exam regulations and spring schedule for more details.
The Office of the Dean of Students (ODOS) has staff who work with students who are dealing with medical and/or personal issues that are interfering with their courses. If you contact ODOS, they will be able to work with you to verify the cause of the disruption, connect you with campus services that may help, and notify me and other professors about the issue. They sometimes make recommendations about what would be reasonable accommodations for your situation, which I will take seriously. If you’re going to fall behind in the reading, class meetings, or homeworks, then get in touch with them as soon as possible (in any case within five days) to tell them about your situation. I’ll expect last-minute or after-the-fact requests for extensions or other academic accommodations to come through the ODOS.
I won’t prohibit the use of laptops or tablets for taking notes, though I discourage this. If you must have a device open in class, don’t browse the web, or read/send texts or other social media during our meetings. It’s pretty clear to everyone when you are doing this, and it’s rude and distracting to your instructors and your classmates.
See this page on classroom expectations for more about this.
You may not record our class meetings in any format without prior express authorization from me and the department. To request the use of assistive technology as an accommodation, contact the ARS (see below). For others, permission to record will only be granted in extraordinary circumstances. Students are never permitted to copy or distribute recordings of the class, and must delete any they possess when the course concludes.
The University’s Class Attendance Policy was summarized above.
The Honor Code and how it applies to this course was also summarized above.
Our AI Use Policy is that generative AI tools are not permitted for any assignment. (They wouldn’t help you anyway.) Use of such tools will be considered an instance of academic dishonesty and will be referred to the Honors Court.
The following is information that the University mandates we include on every syllabus. (So you will see a lot of overlap with your syllabi for other courses.)
In this course, as in other University programs and activities, you should expect an environment free of discrimination, harassment, and other misconduct. If this expectation isn’t respected, here are links for more information about University policies, how to obtain support, and file grievances:
The University’s Policy Statement on Non-discrimination says:
The University is committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment and to ensuring that educational and employment decisions are based on individuals’ abilities and qualifications. Consistent with these principles and applicable laws, it is therefore the University’s policy not to discriminate on the basis of age, color, disability, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation or veteran status as consistent with the University’s Policy on Prohibited Discrimination, Harassment and Related Misconduct. No person, on the basis of protected status, shall be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to unlawful discrimination, harassment, or retaliation under any University program or activity, including with respect to employment terms and conditions. Such a policy ensures that only relevant factors are considered and that equitable and consistent standards of conduct and performance are applied.
Prohibited Discrimination, Harassment and Related Misconduct
Any student who is impacted by sexual discrimination, harassment, dating or relationship violence, sexual violence, sexual exploitation, or stalking is encouraged to seek resources on campus or in the community. Reports can be made online to the Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office (EOC) using this form. Please contact the University’s Title IX Coordinator (Elizabeth Hall, titleixcoordinator@unc.edu), Report and Response Coordinators in the EOC (reportandresponse@unc.edu), Counseling and Psychological Services (confidential, link above), or the Gender Violence Services Coordinators (confidential, gvsc@unc.edu) to discuss your specific needs. Additional resources are available at safe.unc.edu.
If you’re experiencing other forms of harassment or discrimination contrary to University policies, you can also seek assistance through the Report and Response Coordinators in the EOC (reportandresponse@unc.edu), or file a report using the EOC form.
I reserve the right to make changes to the syllabus, including assignment due dates. These changes will be announced as early as possible so that students can adjust their schedules.
I welcome your input about the course at any time. You are welcome to approach me directly. I’ll also provide opportunities for anonymous evaluation and feedback during the term.