What We Teach

The process skills that LogicMills teaches are meant for the entire life of the student. Regardless of the situation or context—the corporate world, school, or one’s social circles—we are constantly required to make informed decisions and draw conclusions. This applies even to young children.

In the classroom, analytical skills are required in all subjects. To be able to read between the lines of a newspaper article. To be able to break down an essay question for the A levels exam. To solve those tricky new IQ-type questions on the PSLE. To answer questions one has never seen before on the O levels. Only excellence in thinking skills can carry students through these challenges that inevitably arise in today’s hyper-competitive world.

And in the workplace, thinking skills are needed to analyze the reasoning in a business plan or to assess the costs and benefits of various business strategies. Analytical Thinking Skills are process skills for successful living.

What we teach is how to apply, how to think, how to present, how to frame an argument, how to use arguments and reasoning. Not content. But, how-to.

1. Basic Analytical Skills

Analytical skills are the tools everyone needs in order to reliably make judgments, draw conclusions, and form reliable assessments from the myriad experiences in all the aspects of life. From the simplest case of deciding what purchase to make, to the potentially life-altering choice of which career path to take, analytical skills are crucial to making these decisions in a well-informed and considered manner.

2. Advanced Reasoning Skills

Good, sound thinking can be learnt. Effective thinking is a process skill and not merely memorisable knowledge. Practice is key to skill acquisition, and with the expert teaching of our LogicMills professors, we can guide students quickly and reliably through the difficult waters ahead. Though a process skill, there is nevertheless a solid content and core to Analytical Skills. Topics in applied logic that we teach include:

• Recognizing Contradictions
• Distinguishing types of opposites: Contraries and Contradictories
• Analyzing Paradoxes: "The next sentence is true. The previous sentence is false."(Epimenidean Paradox)
• Dissolving apparent paradoxes: The statement "There is no truth" must be false.

3. Language and Communication Skills

Clarity and precision of communication is a valuable skill in today’s workplace. Ambiguity, double meanings, inaccuracy, fallacies, and mistakes in expression are major causes of misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

We teach students how to recognize the ambiguities in language and navigate towards clarity of expression and reasoning for themselves. These skills will aid in reducing misunderstandings in class and clarify confusions in lessons. Examples:

• Word Ambiguity: "I saw a large crane by the pond."
• Sentence Ambiguity: "You make a good lunch," said the wolf to the boy chef.

4. Memory Techniques

Our memory techniques help students to recall lists and groups of items in a reliable manner.

5. Exploration

All important schools of thought that exist today—from economic theory to political science, from physics to ethics, and the scientific method itself—have their origins in Philosophy. In our classes, we stimulate students to question, theorize, and search for answers. We also train them to give reasons for their claims and to carefully assess their arguments.