Essays should be approximately 750-1000 words. Think about the impact of environmental issues on the everyday lives of women.  For example, in most households, women do most of the shopping, cleaning, child care, and home health care.  Choose an issue with an environmental impact—such as population control, resource use and recycling, global warming/C0₂ emissions, preservation—and persuade women how they can make a difference on this issue by taking action in their everyday lives. 

Your essay should include: 

• A description of the issue—who is involved or affected by the issue, what are the causes or consequences of the issue, what has been done in the past to address the issue, and how the issue impacts women.
• An argument that proposes a solution that women can implement to solve problems related to the issue.
• A description of the solution, including costs and other counterarguments.
• An explanation of how and why this solution addresses the problem.
• Evidence that this solution is workable and appropriate. 

The deadline for submission to the contest is Friday, December 12, 2008. You should submit essays, with the contest entry form, to:

Dr. Melissa Bonafont
ACC History Department
Northridge Campus

or by email to mbonafon@austincc.edu .

Identity and Politics
Thursday, October 23, 2008
EVC Room 8500, 7-9 pm
In light of the upcoming elections, this panel will focus on how political identity is formed and how identity informs politics, especially race, gender, and their overlap.

Remember that you can attend and turn in your notes from the event with the Miscellaneous Section of the portfolio in order to gain a small extra credit on class participation; and that you can also (in addition to the notes) type up your own brief discussion and evaluation of the topics and arguments involved in the event, to be turned in with the Miscellaneous Section, for a small extra credit on that part of the portfolio.

WHAT IS IDENTITY?
Thursday, October 9, 2008, EVC, Room 8500, 7-9 pm

Who are you? Come to the ERC’s kick-off event for the year and begin the process of finding out! A panel of ACC professors will discuss the central questions for this year’s theme, Identity. What is identity? How do we form our identities? How do we communicate identity? Panelists will consider different key components of our identities, such as ability, class, education, environment, family, gender, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, etc., and relate them to these central questions.

Remember that you can attend and turn in your notes from the event with the Miscellaneous Section of the portfolio in order to gain a small extra credit on class participation; and that you can also (in addition to the notes) type up your own brief discussion and evaluation of the topics and arguments involved in the event, to be turned in with the Miscellaneous Section, for a small extra credit on that part of the portfolio.

(1) universe of discourse

(2) judgment (which can be affirmative or negative)

(3) quantity of subject (which can be universal or particular)

(4) subject term (which can be positive, like ‘punished’, or negative, like ‘unpunished’)

(5) quality of predication (which can be affirmative or negative)

(6) predicate term (which can be positive or negative)

We’ll leave the universe of discourse in the background as assumed. We’ll assign letters to our subject term and predicate term, just as we do with literal diagrams, e.g., S and P. These can be positive or negative, so we’ll indicate this with a plus or minus, for instance:

(+S) (+P)

We want to add in our quality; we’ll give affirmative quality a plus and a negative quality a minus:

(+S)+(+P)

We need to add quantity. We’ll assign a plus sign to the particular and a minus sign to the universal:

+(+S)+(+P)

And we’ll add judgment, by putting it outside:

+(+(+S)+(+P))

This is the expanded form. To make it more handy, we can also take the reduced form, which works just as with algebra. So the reduced form of the above example would be:

+S+P

We can do the same with any categorical proposition. For instance, "No P is R" would be, in expanded form:

+(-(+P)-(+R))

And in reduced form:

-P-R

All A propositions will have the following (reduced) format:

-S+P

All E propositions will have the following format:

-S-P

All I propositions will have the following format:

+S+P

All O propositions will have the following format:

+S-P

We can then use our notation to solve logic problems. To do this we need to understand the basic principle of validity for Sommers notation:

An argument is valid whenever the premises add up to the conclusion and the whole argument is regular.

An argument may be regular in one of two ways: either it has all universal propositions (in both premises and conclusions) or it has one (and only one) particular premise and one particular conclusion.

If you are drawing conclusions:

(1) Define your universe of discourse. This is the background box.

(2) Assign letters to your terms and divide your background box according to the letters. Put the middle term in the middle to simplify things.

(3) Put the information from your premises onto the diagram, one at a time. Remember, E propositions will result in an X for each of two boxes on a triliteral diagram; I and O propositions will result in an O on a line between two boxes on the triliteral diagram; and A propositions will result in an O on a line between two boxes and an X for each of two boxes.

(4) Transfer any complete information about the quadrant from the triliteral diagram to the corresponding biliteral diagram. This complete information is of two kinds: Two X’s in a quadrant rules out the whole quadrant, and an O in a quadrant (not on a line) rules it in.

(5) Translate your conclusion into English.

If you are checking validity of an argument with a conclusion:

Follow the above steps, then check the conclusion you got with the conclusion provided for the argument. If they match, it is valid.

Those who want to practice can use the exercises in Carroll’s Symbolic Logic (online):

Drawing Conclusions: Pages 101-106 (answers on pages 127-129)

Checking Validity: Pages 107-110 (answers on pages 130-131)

To diagram categorical propositions, we used biliteral diagrams, two-term diagrams. That makes sense: categorical propositions have a subject term and a predicate term. But categorical syllogisms have three propositions (two premises and a conclusion), each with their own subject term and predicate term. How are we going to handle that?

Each of the three has its own subject and predicate terms, so we need a new vocabulary to help us keep things straight. Take an argument like the following:

All birds fly. All things that fly have feathers. Therefore all birds have feathers.

Assume that the universe of discourse is ‘Things’. Notice that terms show up more than once. ‘Birds’ is in the first premise and the conclusion. ‘(Things that) fly’ is in the first and second premise. And ‘(things that) have feathers’ is in the second premise and the conclusion.

The minor term of the argument is the term we find in the subject of the conclusion. So the minor term of this argument is ‘Birds’. The minor term is always in one of the premises. This premise is called the minor premise.

The major term of the argument is the term we find in the predicate of the conclusion. So the major term of this argument is ‘(Things that) have feathers’. The major term is always in the other premise. This premise is called the major premise. By tradition the major premise is listed first, but we won’t worry about that for our class, so I haven’t bothered with it here.

There is a third term that is not found in the conclusion, but is shared by the premises. This is called the middle term. It’s what makes the argument work: it’s the in-between term that links the minor term and the major term. Without it, they would be stuck in separate premises; but with the middle term, they can be united into a conclusion. Note that the middle term is never found in the conclusion.

A categorical syllogism is an argument that links a minor term and a major term using a middle term. To diagram it we need a diagram that includes each of these three terms. Thus we get our triliteral diagram. So far in class we’ve just looked at one example: we’ll need to look at more to get a better view of what is going on.

And you can read his closely related work, The Game of Logic, in PDF at Internet Archive.

Besides being enjoyable to read on their own, these are the sources for the logical diagrams that we will be working with this week.

(2) Determine what the subject term and predicate term is. Then assign them letters.

(3) Divide your universe of discourse using your subject term and predicate term. For instance, suppose that your subject term is ‘cat’ and your predicate term is ‘feline’. Then your universe of discourse box needs to include four smaller boxes: a [cat & feline] box, a [cat & nonfeline] box, a [noncat & feline] box, and a [noncat & nonfeline] box.

(4) Determine what the proposition is including in the universe of discourse, what it is excluding, and what it is leaving unknown. For instance, if the proposition is expressed by the sentence, ‘Some cats are felines’, that includes cats that are felines. If it instead tells us that no cats are felines, that excludes cats that are felines. Then we’ll put an O in boxes that are included, an X in boxes that are excluded, and leave blanks where it doesn’t tell us. ‘Some cats are felines’ would have an O in the [cats & felines] box.