Request for Examples

It would assist my critical thinking project if some of you could help me out with a few examples. What I am looking for are examples of statements in the usual forms logicians study but whose content is derived from some academic discipline other than philosophy. I'd also like to avoid the kinds of stock examples from biological classification that logicians are fond of like "All dogs are mammals." The statements could be quite simple or moderately complex.

For example, a very simple statement taken from business is "All budgets are estimates." A somewhat more complex example taken from geology is "All marble is non-foliated metamorphic rock."

So if you could supply me with a couple of examples of categorical statements (A,E, I, O) or conditionals or disjunctions that might actually appear in a textbook or lecture outside of philosophy, it would be of much help.

Critical Thinking

My university decided to give me very generous release time from teaching to work on creating web-based critical thinking units. I will be teaching only one course each semester so that I can devote the bulk of my time to the project. The long range plan, still tentative, is for these units to be assigned in courses across the curriculum so that each one of our 25,000 students will be assigned a short critical thinking unit to do every semester. The implementation of this is a long way off but for this year I have the job of creating eight critical thinking units and have them ready to deploy by next summer at this time. In the meanwhile I will use the units in the one course I am teaching--a section of Critical Thinking.

As I work on this I'd like to try out some ideas on the group and get some feedback. If you have some experience with teaching critical thinking that's great, but even if you don't your perspective as philosophers should be of value. I will provide a link to the webpages themselves so that you can look at them.

The general public and especially employers are asking colleges to do a better job teaching students to think. What I think meets the need most effectively is logic. The logic should be nonsymbolic and practical. I find that categorical logic is useful. I also find that simple sentence logic forms like modus ponens and disjunctive syllogism are good. I am still not completely satisfied with any of the usual approaches to inductive logic, but I do not want to stick wholly to deductive logic. Also I find that specific training in how to object to arguments is both necessary and valuable for students. (For example, asking: "is this an objection to the first premise of the argument or to the second premise?" is surprisingly challenging to ordinary students at first. But once they get used to it their thinking becomes much clearer and more focused.)

That's enough for now. If some of you are willing to help me on this, I will post regular topics for your feedback.