2005 Articles

Beth Too, but Only If

Varzi, Achille C.

Today’s test will be on the conditional connective. As always, I will just give you a sentence in English and you will have to symbolize it in the language of sentential logic. Remember that symbolization is a procedure whereby you extract the logical form of a sentence. This is not just a translation procedure and there is no straightforward algorithm for it; it sometimes involves a difficult process of interpretation. But it is crucially important for logic, for the logical techniques that we are going to develop will apply to well-formed formulas of the language of sentential logic and only indirectly to the sentences of English. It will apply, that is, to the logical forms of the sentences of English.