I am in sudden need of exercises for a critical thinking/logic class, and have no adequate textbook to use. (Copying the exercises out of a textbook would be, I assume, illegal.)
Does anyone know of an online open-source repository (or repositories) of such exercises?
Specifically, I’m looking for stuff covering:
Distinguishing premises and conclusions
Understanding concepts such as deduction, induction, validity, soundness, and inductive strength
Fallacies of various kinds
Formal characteristics of inductive generalizations (i.e. population, sample and target characteristic)
Evaluating strength of inductive generalizations
Mill’s Methods
Evaluating the strength of arguments by analogy
Identifying (and evaluating?) abduction
Formalization and truth-table drawing for relatively simple propositional logic sentennces
Basic natural deduction–mostly just looking for ability to identify basic rules of inference here
Formalizing and Venn-diagramming categorical syllogisms
I can turn out a bunch of stuff myself but if there’s a pre-existing bunch of open-source collections of exercises on these topics, that will save me a lot of time.
Haven’t teachers been doing stuff like that since time immemorial?
My teachers used to write problems up on the blackboard. I think they were (mostly) getting them from books.
I suppose taking all your exercises from one text might be a bit legally dubious, but surely if you were mixing and matching from various texts it ought to be counted as fair use (but note, IANAL).
I suppose taking all your exercises from one text might be a bit legally dubious, but surely if you were mixing and matching from various texts it ought to be counted as fair use (but note, IANAL).
I don’t think it’s fair use, because my use of them would reduce the market for the works I would be copying from. (Because now that I’m copying them, I don’t need to buy the books or have my students buy them.)
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There’s the argument that I wouldn’t have bought the book anyway, but to my knowledge that kind of argument hasn’t been seen to fly in court when it comes to copyright infringement.
Anyway, I’d prefer to find collections of problems online so it’d be easy to copy/paste them. I could probably create my own problems just as fast as I could copy them from a textbook.
Really, you only need to Google for whatever topic it is you want and you’ll probably find plenty of resources. Finding a single uber-source with all topics may be harder to find, on the other hand.
Yyeeahhh… thanks, I’d already googled a bit before writing. I’d found several of the documents you mentioned, and I wrote the OP because none of them quite served my purposes.
It’s unfortunate–it’s looking more and more like there’s nothing like what I’m looking for online. The work you went through at least confirms this for me, which is something. Sorry to have put you through it.
What you get for free is generally “what you can get for free”. Your best bet for quality will be something that’s an out-of-copyright classic. If you target your class more around lectures and problems than reading assignments (since the language will be more dense), that might not be too bad.
How can a thought exercise be “open source”? What’s the source code? Do you just mean you are looking for a set of written exercises which are freely modifiable and redistributable?
Rolleyes smileys are almost by definition antagonistic, FFR.
I’m not worried about anything. I’m looking for an easy and ethical solution to a problem. It appears I will have to give up one of those two desiderata, however.
