1. WHAT IS LOGIC?

Logic may be defined as the science of reasoning. However, this is not

to suggest that logic is an empirical (i.e., experimental or observational)
science like physics, biology, or psychology. Rather, logic is a non-empirical
science like mathematics. Also, in saying that logic is the science of
reasoning, we do not mean that it is concerned with the actual mental (or
physical) process employed by a thinking being when it is reasoning. The
investigation of the actual reasoning process falls more appropriately within
the province of psychology, neurophysiology, or cybernetics.

Even if these empirical disciplines were considerably more advanced

than they presently are, the most they could disclose is the exact process
that goes on in a being's head when he or she (or it) is reasoning. They could
not, however, tell us whether the being is reasoning correctly or incorrectly.

Distinguishing correct reasoning from incorrect reasoning is the task of

logic.

2. INFERENCES AND ARGUMENTS

Reasoning is a special mental activity called inferring, what can also be

called making (or performing) inferences. The following is a useful and
simple definition of the word ‘infer’.

To infer is to draw conclusions from premises.

In place of word ‘premises’, you can also put: ‘data’, ‘information’, ‘facts’.

Examples of Inferences:

(1) You see smoke and infer that there is a fire.

(2) You count 19 persons in a group that originally had 20, and you
infer that someone is missing.

Note carefully the difference between ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, which are
sometimes confused. We infer the fire on the basis of the smoke, but we do
not imply the fire. On the other hand, the smoke implies the fire, but it does
not infer the fire. The word ‘infer’ is not equivalent to the word ‘imply’, nor is
it equivalent to ‘insinuate’.

The reasoning process may be thought of as beginning with input

(premises, data, etc.) and producing output (conclusions). In each specific
case of drawing (inferring) a conclusion C from premises P1, P2, P3, ..., the
details of the actual mental process (how the "gears" work) is not the proper
concern of logic, but of psychology or neurophysiology. The proper concern
of logic is whether the inference of C on the basis of P1, P2, P3, ... is
warranted (correct).

Inferences are made on the basis of various sorts of things – data,

facts, information, states of affairs. In order to simplify the investigation of
reasoning, logic treats all of these things in terms of a single sort of thing –
statements. Logic correspondingly treats inferences in terms of collections of
statements, which are called arguments. The word ‘argument’ has a number
of meanings in ordinary English. The definition of ‘argument’ that is relevant
to logic is given as follows.

An argument is a collection of statements, one of

which is designated as the conclusion, and the
remainder of which are designated as the premises.

Note that this is not a definition of a good argument. Also note that, in
the context of ordinary discourse, an argument has an additional trait,
described as follows.

Usually, the premises of an argument are intended to

support (justify) the conclusion of the argument.

Before giving some concrete examples of arguments, it might be best

to clarify a term in the definition. The word ‘statement’ is intended to mean
declarative sentence. In addition to declarative sentences, there are also
interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences. The sentences that
make up an argument are all declarative sentences; that is, they are all
statements. The following may be taken as the official definition of
‘statement’.

A statement is a declarative sentence, which is to say

a sentence that is capable of being true or false.
 The following are examples of statements.

it is raining
I am hungry
2+2 = 4
God exists

On the other hand the following are examples of sentences that are not
statements.

are you hungry?

shut the door, please
#$%@!!! (replace ‘#$%@!!!’ by your favorite
expletive)

Observe that whereas a statement is capable of being true or false, a

question, or a command, or an exclamation is not capable of being true or
false.

Note that in saying that a statement is capable of being true or false,

we are not saying that we know for sure which of the two (true, false) it is.
Thus, for a sentence to be a statement, it is not necessary that humankind
knows for sure whether it is true, or whether it is false. An example is the
statement ‘God exists’.

Now let us get back to inferences and arguments. Earlier, we

discussed two examples of inferences. Let us see how these can be
represented as arguments. In the case of the smoke-fire inference, the
corresponding argument is given as follows.

(a1) there is smoke (premise)

therefore, there is fire (conclusion)

Here the argument consists of two statements, ‘there is smoke’ and ‘there is
fire’. The term ‘therefore’ is not strictly speaking part of the argument; it
rather serves to designate the conclusion (‘there is fire’), setting it off from
the premise (‘there is smoke’). In this argument, there is just one premise.

In the case of the missing-person inference, the corresponding

argument is given as follows.
 (a2) there were 20 persons originally (premise)
there are 19 persons currently (premise)
therefore, someone is missing (conclusion)

Here the argument consists of three statements – ‘there were 20 persons

originally’, ‘there are 19 persons currently’, and ‘someone is missing’. Once
again, ‘therefore’
sets off the conclusion from the premises.
In principle, any collection of statements can be treated as an
argument simply by designating which statement in particular is the
conclusion. However, not every collection of statements is intended to be an
argument. We accordingly need criteria by which to distinguish arguments
from other collections of statements.

There are no hard and fast rules for telling when a collection of
statements is intended to be an argument, but there are a few rules of
thumb. Often an argument can be identified as such because its conclusion
is marked. We have already seen one conclusion-marker – the word
‘therefore’. Besides ‘therefore’, there are other words that are commonly
used to mark conclusions of arguments, including ‘consequently’, ‘hence’,
‘thus’, ‘so’, and ‘ergo’. Usually, such words indicate that what follows is the
conclusion of an argument.

Other times an argument can be identified as such because its

premises are marked. Words that are used for this purpose include: ‘for’,
‘because’, and ‘since’.
For example, using the word ‘for’, the smoke-fire argument (a1) earlier can
be rephrased as follows.

(a1') there is fire

for there is smoke

Note that in (a1') the conclusion comes before the premise.

Other times neither the conclusion nor the premises of an argument

are marked, so it is harder to tell that the collection of statements is
intended to be an argument. A general rule of thumb applies in this case, as
well as in previous cases.

In an argument, the premises are intended to support

(justify) the conclusion.

To state things somewhat differently, when a person (speaking or

writing) advances an argument, he(she) expresses a statement he(she)
believes to be true (the conclusion), and he(she) cites other statements as a
reason for believing that statement (the premises).

3. DEDUCTIVE LOGIC VERSUS INDUCTIVE LOGIC

Let us go back to the two arguments from the previous section.

(a1) there is smoke;

therefore, there is fire.

(a2) there were 20 people originally;

there are 19 persons currently;
therefore, someone is missing.

There is an important difference between these two inferences, which

corresponds to a division of logic into two branches.

On the one hand, we know that the existence of smoke does not
guarantee (ensure) the existence of fire; it only makes the existence of fire
likely or probable.
Thus, although inferring fire on the basis of smoke is reasonable, it is
nevertheless fallible. Insofar as it is possible for there to be smoke without
there being fire, we may be wrong in asserting that there is a fire.

The investigation of inferences of this sort is traditionally called

inductive logic. Inductive logic investigates the process of drawing probable
(likely, plausible) though fallible conclusions from premises. Another way of
stating this: inductive logic investigates arguments in which the truth of the
premises makes likely the truth of the conclusion.

Inductive logic is a very difficult and intricate subject, partly because

the practitioners (experts) of this discipline are not in complete agreement
concerning what constitutes correct inductive reasoning.

Inductive logic is not the subject of this book. If you want to learn
about inductive logic, it is probably best to take a course on probability and
statistics. Inductive reasoning is often called statistical (or probabilistic)
reasoning, and forms the basis of experimental science.

Inductive reasoning is important to science, but so is deductive

reasoning, which is the subject of this book.

Consider argument (a2) above. In this argument, if the premises are in

fact true, then the conclusion is certainly also true; or, to state things in the
subjunctive mood, if the premises were true, then the conclusion would
certainly also be true. Still another way of stating things: the truth of the
premises necessitates the truth of the conclusion.

The investigation of these sorts of arguments is called deductive logic.

The following should be noted. Suppose that you have an argument

and suppose that the truth of the premises necessitates (guarantees) the
truth of the conclusion. Then it follows (logically!) that the truth of the
premises makes likely the truth of the conclusion. In other words, if an
argument is judged to be deductively correct, then it is also judged to be
inductively correct as well. The converse is not true: not every inductively
correct argument is also deductively correct; the smoke-fire argument is an
example of an inductively correct argument that is not deductively correct.
For whereas the existence of smoke makes likely the existence of fire it does
not guarantee the existence of fire.

In deductive logic, the task is to distinguish deductively correct

arguments from deductively incorrect arguments. Nevertheless, we should
keep in mind that, although an argument may be judged to be deductively
incorrect, it may still be reasonable, that is, it may still be inductively correct.

Some arguments are not inductively correct, and therefore are not
deductively correct either; they are just plain unreasonable. Suppose you
flunk intro logic, and suppose that on the basis of this you conclude that it
will be a breeze to get into law school. Under these circumstances, it seems
that your reasoning is faulty.

4. STATEMENTS VERSUS PROPOSITIONS

Henceforth, by ‘logic’ I mean deductive logic.

Logic investigates inferences in terms of the arguments that represent

them.
Recall that an argument is a collection of statements (declarative
sentences), one of which is designated as the conclusion, and the remainder
of which are designated as the premises. Also recall that usually in an
argument the premises are offered to support or justify the conclusions.

Statements, and sentences in general, are linguistic objects, like

words. They consist of strings (sequences) of sounds (spoken language) or
strings of symbols (written language). Statements must be carefully
distinguished from the propositions they express (assert) when they are
uttered. Intuitively, statements stand in the same relation to propositions as
nouns stand to the objects they denote. Just as the word ‘water’ denotes a
substance that is liquid under normal circumstances, the sentence
(statement) ‘water is wet’ denotes the proposition that water is wet;
equivalently, the sentence denotes the state of affairs the wetness of water.

The difference between the five letter word ‘water’ in English and the
liquid substance it denotes should be obvious enough, and no one is apt to
confuse the word and the substance. Whereas ‘water’ consists of letters,
water consists of molecules. The distinction between a statement and the
proposition it expresses is very much like the distinction between the word
‘water’ and the substance water.

There is another difference between statements and propositions.

Whereas statements are always part of a particular language (e.g., English),
propositions are not peculiar to any particular language in which they might
be expressed. Thus, for example, the following are different statements in
different languages, yet they all express the same proposition – namely, the
whiteness of snow.

snow is white
der Schnee ist weiss
la neige est blanche(French)

In this case, quite clearly different sentences may be used to express

the same proposition. The opposite can also happen: the same sentence
may be used in different contexts, or under different circumstances, to
express different propositions, to denote different states of affairs. For
example, the statement ‘I am hungry’ expresses a different proposition for
each person who utters it. When I utter it, the proposition expressed pertains
to my stomach; when you utter it, the proposition pertains to your stomach;
when the president utters it, the proposition pertains to his(her) stomach.

5. FORM VERSUS CONTENT

 Although propositions (or the meanings of statements) are always
lurking behind the scenes, logic is primarily concerned with statements. The
reason is that statements are in some sense easier to point at, easier to work
with; for example, we can write a statement on the blackboard and examine
it. By contrast, since they are essentially abstract in nature, propositions
cannot be brought into the classroom, or anywhere. Propositions are
unwieldy and uncooperative. What is worse, no one quite knows exactly
what they are!

There is another important reason for concentrating on statements

rather than propositions. Logic analyzes and classifies arguments according
to their form, as opposed to their content (this distinction will be explained
later). Whereas the form of a statement is fairly easily understood, the form
of a proposition is not so easily understood. Whereas it is easy to say what a
statement consists of, it is not so easy to say what a proposition consists of.

A statement consists of words arranged in a particular order. Thus, the

form of a statement may be analyzed in terms of the arrangement of its
constituent words. To be more precise, a statement consists of terms, which
include simple terms and compound terms. A simple term is just a single
word together with a specific grammatical role (being a noun, or being a
verb, etc.). A compound term is a string of words that act as a grammatical
unit within statements. Examples of compound terms include noun phrases,
such as ‘the president of the U.S.’, and predicate phrases, such as ‘is a
Democrat’.

For the purposes of logic, terms divide into two important categories –
descriptive terms and logical terms. One must carefully note, however, that
this distinction is not absolute. Rather, the distinction between descriptive
and logical terms depends upon the level (depth) of logical analysis we are
pursuing.

Let us pursue an analogy for a moment. Recall first of all that the core
meaning of the word ‘analyze’ is to break down a complex whole into its
constituent parts. In physics, matter can be broken down (analyzed) at
different levels; it can be analyzed into molecules, into atoms, into
elementary particles (electrons, protons, etc.); still deeper levels of analysis
are available (e.g., quarks). The basic idea in breaking down matter is that in
order to go deeper and deeper one needs ever increasing amounts of
energy, and one needs ever increasing sophistication.

The same may be said about logic and the analysis of language. There
are many levels at which we can analyze language, and the deeper levels
require more logical sophistication than the shallower levels (they also
require more energy on the part of the logician!)

In the present text, we consider three different levels of logical

analysis. Each of these levels is given a name – Syllogistic Logic, Sentential
Logic, and Predicate Logic. Whereas syllogistic logic and sentential logic
represent relatively superficial (shallow) levels of logical analysis, predicate
logic represents a relatively deep level of analysis. Deeper levels of analysis
are available.

Each level of analysis – syllogistic logic, sentential logic, and predicate

logic – has associated with it a special class of logical terms. In the case of
syllogistic logic, the logical terms include only the following: ‘all’, ‘some’,
‘no’, ‘not’, and ‘is/are’. In the case of sentential logic, the logical terms
include only sentential connectives (e.g., ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if...then’, ‘only if’). In
the case of predicate logic, the logical terms include the logical terms of both
syllogistic logic and sentential logic.

As noted earlier, logic analyzes and classifies arguments according to

their form. The (logical) form of an argument is a function of the forms of the
individual statements that constitute the argument. The logical form of a
statement, in turn, is a function of the arrangement of its terms, where the
logical terms are regarded as more important than the descriptive terms.
Whereas the logical terms have to do with the form of a statement, the
descriptive terms have to do with its content.

Note, however, that since the distinction between logical terms and
descriptive terms is relative to the particular level of analysis we are
pursuing, the notion of logical form is likewise relative in this way. In
particular, for each of the different logics listed above, there is a
corresponding notion of logical form.

The distinction between form and content is difficult to understand in

the abstract. It is best to consider some actual examples. In a later section,
we examine this distinction in the context of syllogistic logic.

As soon as we can get a clear idea about form and content, then we
can discuss how to classify arguments into those that are deductively correct
and those that are not deductively correct.

6. PRELIMINARY DEFINITIONS
 In the present section we examine some of the basic ideas in logic
which will be made considerably clearer in subsequent chapters.

As we saw in the previous section there is a distinction in logic

between form and content. There is likewise a distinction in logic between
arguments that are good in form and arguments that are good in content.
This distinction is best understood by way of an example or two. Consider
the following arguments.

(a1) all cats are dogs

all dogs are reptiles
therefore, all cats are reptiles

(a2) all cats are vertebrates

all mammals are vertebrates
therefore, all cats are mammals

Neither of these arguments is good, but they are bad for different
reasons. Consider first their content. Whereas all the statements in (a1) are
false, all the statements in (a2) are true. Since the premises of (a1) are not
all true this is not a good argument as far as content goes, whereas (a2) is a
good argument as far as content goes.

Now consider their forms. This will be explained more fully in a later
section. The question is this: do the premises support the conclusion? Does
the conclusion follow from the premises?

In the case of (a1), the premises do in fact support the conclusion; the
conclusion does in fact follow from the premises. Although the premises are
not true, if they were true then the conclusion would also be true, of
necessity.

In the case of (a2), the premises are all true, and so is the conclusion,
but nevertheless the truth of the conclusion is not conclusively supported by
the premises; in (a2), the conclusion does not follow from the premises. To
see that the conclusion does not follow from the premises, we need merely
substitute the term ‘reptiles’ for ‘mammals’. Then the premises are both true
but the conclusion is false.

All of this is meant to be at an intuitive level. The details will be

presented later. For the moment, however we give some rough definitions to
help us get started in understanding the ways of classifying various
arguments.
 In examining an argument there are basically two questions one
should ask.

Question 1: Are all of the premises true?

Question 2: Does the conclusion follow from the
premises?

The classification of a given argument is based on the answers to

these two questions. In particular, we have the following definitions.

An argument is factually correct

if and only if
all of its premises are true.

An argument is valid
if and only if
its conclusion follows from its premises.

An argument is sound
if and only if
it is both factually correct and valid.

Basically, a factually correct argument has good content, and a valid

argument has good form, and a sound argument has both good content and
good form.

Note that a factually correct argument may have a false conclusion;

the definition only refers to the premises.

Whether an argument is valid is sometimes difficult to decide.

Sometimes it is hard to know whether or not the conclusion follows from the
premises. Part of the problem has to do with knowing what ‘follows from’
means. In studying logic we are attempting to understand the meaning of
‘follows from’; more importantly perhaps, we are attempting to learn how to
distinguish between valid and invalid arguments.

Although logic can teach us something about validity and invalidity, it

can teach us very little about factual correctness. The question of the truth
or falsity of individual statements is primarily the subject matter of the
sciences, broadly construed.

As a rough-and-ready definition of validity, the following is offered.

An argument is valid
if and only if
 it is impossible for
the conclusion to be false
while the premises are all true.

An alternative definition might be helpful in understanding validity.

To say that an argument is valid

is to say that
if the premises were true,
then the conclusion would necessarily also be true.

These will become clearer as you read further, and as you study particular
examples.

Prepared by:

Mr. Romel LLubit

Instructor