Text Book Chapters
Textbook chapters featured in the course modules
Informal Fallacies
Dean Da vee
Deductive Logic
Alex LeBrun
This chapter introduces students to common informal fallacies. Students learn to identify fallacies of relevance, such as ad hominem, strawman, red herring, whataboutism, and appeal to unqualified authority or popularity, as well as fallacies of presumption, including begging the question, false cause, slippery slope, hasty generalization, argument from ignorance, and false dichotomy. Throughout, real-world examples help students recognize these patterns in everyday reasoning, political discourse, and public debate.
This chapter introduces students to the basics of deductive logic. Students learn to represent sentences using letters and logical connectives such as negation, conjunction, disjunction, conditional, or biconditional, and practice translating everyday arguments into symbolic form. The chapter then covers truth tables and finally, students apply truth tables to three key logical concepts: equivalence, consistency, and validity.
A project funded by:
Chancellor's Office
California State University
AI Educational Innovation Challenge
2025-2026
Critical Thinking and AI Group
California Polytechnic State University
Philosophy Department
F. Fernflores (PI)
