Juan Comesaña
← PHIL 109

Introduction to Formal Reasoning and Decision Making

Juan Comesaña

This is a textbook to accompany Philosophy 109 at Rutgers New Brunswick. I have borrowed extensively from teaching notes by Max Bialek, Brian Weatherson, and Jonathan Weisberg. I have also borrowed from Resnik’s Choices for chapter 10.

This web edition is in progress: chapters appear here as they are converted from the book. Each one has the solutions to its exercises, and “Try it” links that open the course labs on the book's own examples.

Contents

Part I Logic

  1. The language of propositional logic
  2. Translations
  3. Arguments and validity

Part II Probability

  1. Measures and stochastic truth-tables
  2. Axioms, definitions, and theorems
  3. Bayesianism

Part III Decision and Game Theory

  1. Decisions under ignorance
  2. Decisions under risk
  3. Newcomb’s problem
  4. Games

The exercises and examples link to the course labs.