After completing this course students are able to:

'The Humanities Lab: Logic, Discourse and Representation' is mandatory for all humanities students, as well as social science students who wish to finish tracks in law or political sciences. It can be an elective for other students.

Part 1 - Approaches to the Humanities
The first part of this course introduces students into some crucial research methods and methodologies across the humanities - including literature, art, film, history, and culture in the broadest sense of the word. There is no single handbook that deals with the combined disciplines of the humanities. Therefore, we will use chapters from different books on theoretical approaches and methods in the humanities, which will aid students to situate their own ideas in the context of contemporary theoretical and methodological debates.

Part 2 - Propositional Logic and Discourse
The second five weeks of the course introduces students to basic concepts of logic and pragmatics that can be applied to the interpretation and evaluation of discourse, and provides students with the opportunity to put these concepts into practice.  Logic provides formal tools that can distinguish bad arguments from good ones, those that derive a true conclusion from true premises; logic allows us to determine algorithmically whether the premises of an argument support the conclusion.  Pragmatics considers the situational context of discourse, including how the knowledge and beliefs of the participants in discourse (speaker/hearer or writer/reader) contribute to the conclusions its participants can draw.  The course introduces students to the symbolism and concepts of propositional logic, to techniques that can demonstrate the validity of arguments, and to pragmatic considerations that can influence the effectiveness of arguments in discourse.  Students will become familiar with the logical relations that can exist between statements, with logical proofs, as well as some basic tools of pragmatic analysis.

Format
The format of the first part of the course will largely be based on the concept of “learning by doing”. Students have to prepare for classes by reading selected materials and completing individual assignments which will be discussed in class. The assignments will be part of a portfolio that the student has to hand in at the end of the course. 1-hour lectures, in-class exercises, seminars, presentations.
In part two, students will be introduced to a new topic in Propositional Logic every week, and will be given the opportunity to practice it in class, where they will receive immediate feedback from the instructor. During week 10, students will sit in an in-class exam where they will be asked to solve a number of exercises similar in format and complexity to those practiced in class.

Directly following this 5 ECTS course, students continue in one of the separate 5 week course modules (2,5 ECTS). Separate outlines are available for these course modules: