This course blends two areas of study that are often kept separate in university courses on logic: informal logic and formal (or symbolic) logic. Informal logic's emphasis is on natural language arguments relatively simple in structure, on rules of valid inference as codified in what is called traditional logic, and on the identification of mistakes in reasoning that make arguments logically weak though possibly persuasive (fallacies). Formal logic builds a symbolic representation of sentences and arguments, describes rigorous tests for determining whether symbolized arguments are valid, and provides the means to assess arguments of far greater complexity than the rules of traditional logic are able to manage.
