The exercise is sometimes irksome to
students, for it is hard work at first and calls for concentration of
mind: but it can be sweetened and made livelier by the competition of
classroom discussion.
All through the work on the argument students may well be set to
watching the daily papers and the magazines for examples of arguments,
and of good and bad reasoning. Very often an instructor can get, at the
cost of a cent or two apiece, a set of arguments printed in a newspaper
for his class to analyze. Senators and representatives in Congress are
notably willing to send copies of speeches, and these sometimes furnish
good examples of both sound and unsound reasoning.
If time serves, instructors will do well to give a grounding in logic. I
have inserted a brief discussion of the subject with the hope that it
will furnish a basis for a short study; it can be reenforced by a few
weeks on such a manual as Jevons's "Primer of Logic," or Bode's "Outline
of Logic" if there is time. Whatever be one's view of the positive value
of deductive logic, there can be no doubt that every student should have
some knowledge of the canons of inductive logic, and that a study of
propositions and syllogisms is a mighty sharpener of the discrimination
for the real meaning of words and sentences.
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