Teaching Philosophy

Volume 29, Issue 1, March 2006

D. D. Hutchins
Pages 41-44

Promises, Promises
Teaching Conditionals and Disjunctions

For many students, success or failure hinges on their ability to locate logic within the context of everyday thought. One way of accomplishing this task is to emphasize the connections between natural and symbolic language. Many students, however, find that symbolic logic occasionally deviates from their expectations. In particular, they commonly have difficulty understanding the rationale behind the false antecedent conditional and the inclusive disjunction. In this article, I outline a teaching strategy that employs promise keeping as an analogy for these standard interpretations of the propositional operators.