Logic and Language
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In this lecture, I tacitly acknowledge that it was insane for the author of our text, whoever he was, to put all five rules of validity into a single section of the text. We’ll take section 7.3 in two parts, and in this part I cover the first three rules of validity, which all deal
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Here we get to the heart of traditional logic: the ability to learn what we don’t know from things we already do know, even things we know to be false. We do this through propositions of equivalence and opposition.
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People don’t always speak in standard logical form, so we need to translate what they say into what they really mean. Sometimes, we have to translate what we say into what we really mean. The trouble is that translation is hard. One lecture won’t make you good at it, but it can get you pointed
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In this lecture we take another look at a topic we first covered back in chapter 2 (supposition) to dive a little deeper into how we did what we did back there. But more importantly, we introduce the concept of distribution, which will have huge significance over the next two chapters as we start evaluating
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Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (rhymes with “boiler”) gave us an ingenious system for representing the four basic categorical propositions with diagrams consisting of two circles each. For many students, these “Euler’s Circles” make it much clearer exactly what the A, E, I, and O propositions are saying (and what they’re not saying).
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The number of categorical propositions is infinite, but every single one of them is one of just four types. Here’s how we identify them.
Logic Lectures 