This text offers an innovative approach to the teaching of logic, which is rigorous but entirely non-symbolic. By introducing students to deductive inferences in natural language, the book breaks new ground pedagogically. Cannon focuses on such topics as using a tableaux technique to assess inconsistency; using generative grammar; employing logical analyses of sentences; and dealing with quantifier expressions and syllogisms. An appendix covers truth-functional logic.
This text offers an innovative approach to the teaching of logic, which is rigorous but entirely non-symbolic. By introducing students to deductive inferences in natural language, the book breaks new ground pedagogically. Cannon focuses on such topics as using a tableaux technique to assess inconsistency; using generative grammar; employing logical analyses of sentences; and dealing with quantifier expressions and syllogisms. An appendix covers truth-functional logic.
The Logic of Our Language teaches the practical and everyday application of formal logic. Rather than overwhelming the reader with abstract theory, Jackson and McLeod show how the skills developed through the practice of logic can help us to better understand our own language and reasoning processes. The authors’ goal is to draw attention to the patterns and logical structures inherent in our spoken and written language by teaching the reader how to translate English sentences into formal symbols. Other logical tools, including truth tables, truth trees, and natural deduction, are then introduced as techniques for examining the properties of symbolized sentences and assessing the validity of arguments. A substantial number of practice questions are offered both within the book itself and as interactive activities on a companion website.
Clear focus on its application of formal logic to ordinary English is the most distinctive feature of this textbook for the introductory course in deductive logic. Great care is taken with the appropriate translation into logical languages of ordinary English sentences. Evaluation of these translations promotes a more effective use of ordinary language. The Principles of Deductive Logic presents symbolic logic in a fuller and more leisurely fashion than other introductory textbooks. Early chapters cover informal material, including definition and informal fallacies. The remainder of the text is devoted to the treatment of four distinct artificial languages. The Categorical language is the language of syllogistic logic. The Extended Categorical language enriches this first language with the symbolic connectives for conjunction and negation. The Propositional Connective language and the First-Order language (with identity) are the two basic languages of modern logic. Each language is accompanied by a deductive system, and is used as an instrument for exploring ordinary language, including ordinary arguments The book contains a large number of exercises whose answers are supplied in the back of the book, and many more that can be assigned as homework. A solution's manual is available to instructors upon their request. The request must be written on college or university letterhead.
A novel logic-based framework for representing the syntax-semantics interface of natural language, applicable to a range of phenomena. In this book, Yusuke Kubota and Robert Levine propose a type-logical version of categorial grammar as a viable alternative model of natural language syntax and semantics. They show that this novel logic-based framework is applicable to a range of phenomena—especially in the domains of coordination and ellipsis—that have proven problematic for traditional approaches. The type-logical syntax the authors propose takes derivations of natural language sentences to be proofs in a particular kind of logic governing the way words and phrases are combined. This logic builds on and unifies two deductive systems from the tradition of categorial grammar; the resulting system, Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (Hybrid TLCG) enables comprehensive approaches to coordination (gapping, dependent cluster coordination, and right-node raising) and ellipsis (VP ellipsis, pseudogapping, and extraction/ellipsis interaction). It captures a number of intricate patterns of interaction between scopal operators and seemingly incomplete constituents that are frequently found in these two empirical domains. Kubota and Levine show that the hybrid calculus underlying their framework incorporates key analytic ideas from competing approaches in the generative syntax literature to offer a unified and systematic treatment of data that have posed considerable difficulties for previous accounts. Their account demonstrates that logic is a powerful tool for analyzing the deeper principles underlying the syntax and semantics of natural language.
This book addresses the hasty development of modern logic, especially its introducing and embracing various kinds of artificial languages and moving from the study of natural languages to that of artificial ones. This shift seemed extremely helpful and managed to elevate logic to a new level of rigor and clarity. However, the change that logic underwent in this way was in no way insignificant, and it is also far from an insignificant matter to determine to what extent the "new logic" only engaged new and more powerful instruments to answer the questions posed by the "old" one, and to what extent it replaced these questions with new ones. Hence, this movement has generated brand new kinds of philosophical problems that have still not been dealt with systematically. Philosophy of Logical Systems addresses these new kinds of philosophical problems that are intertwined with the development of modern logic. Jaroslav Peregrin analyzes the rationale behind the introduction of the artificial languages of logic; classifies the various tools which were adopted to build such languages; gives an overview of the various kinds of languages introduced in the course of modern logic and the motifs of their employment; discusses what can actually be achieved by relocating the problems of logic from natural language into them; and reaches certain conclusions with respect to the possibilities and limitations of this "formal turn" of logic. This book is both an important scholarly contribution to the philosophy of logic and a systematic survey of the standard (and not so standard) logical systems that were established during the short history of modern logic.
This text does not presuppose any technical background in math or logic. The first seven chapters cover all the basic components of a first course in symbolic logic, including truth tables, rules for devising formal proofs of validity, multiple quantifiers, properties of relations, enthymemes, and identity. (One exception is that truth trees are not discussed.) The five operator symbols used are: (.) and, (v) or, ( ) not, and also if-then, represented by the sideways U and material equivalence represented by the triple line. There are also four chapters which can be studied without symbolic logic background. Chapter 8 is a study of 7 immediate inferences in Aristotelian logic using A, E, I, O type statements with a detailed proof concerning what existential assumptions are involved. Chapter 9 is a study of classic Boolean syllogism using Venn diagrams to show the validity or invalidity of syllogisms. Chapter 10 is a study of the type of probability problems that are deductive (example: having 2 aces in 5 cards drawn from a randomized deck of cards). Chapter 11 is a study of the types of problems that are often found on standardized tests where certain data are given, and then multiple-choice questions are given where the single correct answer is determined by the data. In the symbolic logic chapters, it is shown many times how putting English statements into symbolic notation reveals the complexity (and sometimes ambiguity) of natural language. Many examples are given of the usage of logic in everyday life, with statements to translate taken from musicals, legal documents, federal tax instructions, etc. Several sections involve arguments given in English, which must be translated into symbolic notation before proof of validity is given. Chapter 7 ends with a careful presentation of Richard's Paradox, challenging those who dismiss the problem because it is not strictly mathematical. The conclusion of this chapter is the most controversial part of the text. Richard's paradox is used to construct a valid symbolic logic proof that Cantor's procedure does not prove there are nondenumerable sets, with a challenge to the reader to identify and prove which premise of the argument is false. There are several uncommon features of the text. For example, there is a section where it is shown how the rules of logic are used in solving Sudoku puzzles. Another section challenges students to devise arguments (premises and conclusion) that can be solved in a certain number of steps (say 3) only by using a certain 3 rules, one time each (for example, Modus Ponens, Simplification, and Conjunction). In proofs of invalidity, if there are 10 simple statements (for example), there are 1024 possible combinations of truth values that the 10 statements can have. But the premises and conclusions are set up so that only 1 of these combinations will make all the premises true and the conclusion false - and this 1 way can be found by forced truth-value assignments, with no need to take options. Another unusual section of the text defines the five operator symbols as relations (for example, Cxy = x conjuncted with y is true), and then statements about the operators are given to determine whether the statements are true or false. To aid in deciding what sections to cover in a given course or time frame, certain sections are labeled "optional" as an indication that understanding these sections is not presupposed by later sections in the text. Although there are a ton of problems with answers in the text, any teacher using this text for a course can receive free of charge an answer book giving answers to all the problems not answered in the text, plus a few cases of additional problems not given in the text, also with answers. Send your request to [email protected], and you will be sent an answer key using your address at the school where you teach.
