From: The International Encyclopedia of

Language and Linguistics, 2nd Edition

John Lawler, University of Michigan

and Western Washington University

Notation, Logical (see: Notation, Mathematical)

Notation is a conventional written system for encoding a formal axiomatic system .
Notation governs:
the rules for assignment of written symbols to elements of the axiomatic system
the writing and interpretation rules for well-formed formulae in the axiomatic system
the derived writing and interpretation rules for representing transformations of
formulae, in accordance with the rules of deduction in the axiomatic system.
All formal systems impose notational conventions on the forms. Just as in natural
language, to some extent such conventions are matters of style and politics, even defining
group affiliation. Thus notational conventions display sociolinguistic variation ; alternate
conventions are often in competing use, though there is usually substantial agreement on
a classical core notation taught to neophytes.
This article is about notational conventions in formal logic, which is (in the view of most
mathematicians) that branch of mathematics (logicians, by contrast, tend to think of
mathematics as a branch of logic; both metaphors are correct, in the appropriate formal
axiomatic system) most concerned with many questions that arise in natural language,
e.g, questions of meaning, syntax, predication, well-formedness, and for our purposes,
the most important such detailed, precise specification. Specification is the purpose of
notation, both in mathematics and in science, but such precise conventions are
unavoidably context-sensitive. Thus the use of logical notation is different in logic and in
linguistics. Bochenski 1948 (English translation 1960) is still the best short introduction
to logical notation.
Almost all logical notation is modern, dating from the last century and a half. However,
there is some prior work that deserves comment here, since logic, alone of all
mathematical fields, was widely studied and significantly developed in the European
Middle Ages.
The principal concern of Medieval logicians was the syllogism. By the time of the
Renaissance, there was an extensive and thorough account of syllogistic. One of its major
achievements was the development of systematic names for the modes of the syllogism.
These names (as conventionally grouped, Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferio, Barbarix,
Feraxo; Cesare, Festino, Camestres, Baroco, Camestrop, Cesarox; Darapti, Disamis,
Datisi, Felapton, Bocardo, Ferison; Bramantip, Camenes, Dimaris, Fesapo, Fresison,
Camenop) constitute the first real notational convention in logic.
The names are mnemonic, designed to be chanted, like Paninis rules. The three vowels
in each name are the letters A, E, I, O, which mark the vertices of the Square of
Opposition, indicating the proposition type (respectively, Universal Affirmative,
Universal Negative, Existential Affirmative, and Existential Negative) of each of the
three propositions of the syllogism. The letters s, p, m, and c also have specific meanings
in these mnemonics, summarizing relevant logical properties of each type, thus serving
the notational goal of detailed, precise specification. Syllogistic is largely of historical
interest in modern logic, but its concerns, terminology, and notation continued to be used
and understood until well into the development of modern logic.

In modern logic and mathematics, notation is a necessary part of a calculus, one of a

number of special sets of formalized concepts and techniques for manipulating them. The
metaphor refers to the origins of classical calculation, which was performed with pebbles
(Lat calculus) on a counting-table or abacus. This metaphor licenses notational practice
with formal systems, which is to
Encode: represent parts (hopefully, natural parts) of a quantity, concept, or truth
with symbols, then
Calculate: push those symbols around in conventionally-accepted fashions,
hoping thereby to
Decode: find in the changed symbolic patterns representations of previously
unknown quantities, concepts, or truths.
Calculi are an invention of the Seventeenth Century; the best known are Leibnizs
integral calculus and Newtons differential calculus, which (together) are understood as
the default meaning of calculus in modern English.
There are many calculi in modern mathematics, some of which exist in name only, like
Leibnizs putative calculus ratiocinator. In symbolic logic, which is the closest thing to
what Leibniz called for, the two most important calculi, each with its own notational
conventions, are Propositional Calculus and Predicate Calculus, both of which were
originally intended straightforwardly (as the titles of their original publications show) as
tools for the represention of human thought. Language did not enter into the picture at
first, except as a transparent expression of thought.
Propositional Calculus. Symbolic logic, and its notation, originated in the works of
George Boole (1815-1864), of which Boole (1854) is the best known. Booles intention
was to produce an algebraic account of propositions as combined via what we have come
to call Boolean connectors, principally (logical) and, or, not, equivalent, and implies,
which then achieved the dual status of English words that are not only prominent in
logical discussion, but are also mathematically defined functors. Boole first made
explicit the alternation between logical and and or enshrined in DeMorgans Laws,
comparing them (respectively) to multiplication and addition in algebra; thus he
represented x and y as xy, while x or y was x+y; he used numbers throughout, using 1-x to
represent not x, for instance. This notational convention, and the system based on it, is
often called Boolean Algebra (though technically it is a complemented distributive
lattice, not an algebra). Booles logic did not use quantifiers per se; instead he dealt with
the quantification inherent in syllogistic by using the traditional letters A, E, I, O.
Propositional calculus, the calculus of arbitrary whole propositions without regard to their
predicates or arguments, uses two major notations. One, usually called Classical or
Standard, exists in numerous individual variations and is usually the one taught to
students; the other, called Polish, ukasiewicz, or Prefix, is standardized and in
widespread technical use.
Classical notation for propositional calculus uses lower-case letters for propositions
(traditionally p, q, r, s) and special symbols for their connectives. The two truth values of
a proposition are usually either T and F, or 1 and 0. In ternary logics, T / F / # is more
common than numeric codes, since arithmetic systems like 1 / 0/ -1 or 1 / / 0 make
implicit algebraic claims.
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The Classical special symbols for functors include:

not p:

p, - p, ~ p, p

p and q:

p q, p q, p & q, p q

p or q:

pq

p implies q:

p q, p q, p q

p is equivalent to q:

p q, p q, p q

In each case, the first symbol is the most widely accepted. In addition to functors,
propositional logic also contains symbols for pragmatic connectives used in proofs, such
as entailment, which usually uses a single arrow (), and assertion, which uses a variety
of symbols, including .
There are also parentheses, since grouping of formulae can introduce significant
ambiguity, which is anathema in logic. In extended use, parentheses were found to be
burdensome, since balancing them was a frequent source of avoidable error. To combat
this, Whitehead and Russell in their monumental Principia Mathematica (1910-13),
developed a special parenthesis-free notation to augment their Classical formulae, based
on using groups of 1, 2, 3, dots to separate propositions. This version is rarely seen
today.
Polish notation was developed and popularized by Jan ukasiewicz (1878-1956) in the
early 1920s as a byproduct of his development of ternary logic, for which he also
invented the truth table . In this notation, propositions are again represented by lowercase letters, but functors are upper-case letters placed immediately before their
argument(s): not p is Np, p and q is Kpq, p or q is Apq, p implies q is Cpq, and
p is equivalent to q is Epq. Since functors form valid propositions, these can be nested
indefinitely without recourse to parentheses; for instance, De Morgans Laws, which are
stated in Classical notation as (p q) p q and (p q) p q, are stated in
Polish notation respectively as EKNpqANpNq and EANpqKNpNq.
Since the prefixal position of the Polish functors is arbitrary, a postfixal variant, called
Reverse Polish Notation, or RPN (linguists always note that it should be called Japanese
Notation, because it acts exactly like an SOV language ), is equally valid, and is widely
used in computing circles, since it turns out to be ideally adapted to performing
calculations using a pushdown stack . In RPN, De Morgans laws are stated as
pNqKpNqNAE and pNqApNqNKE.
Modal Logic, an extension of propositional calculus into modality, introduces two more
common notational symbols, p for p is possibly true (in Polish notation Mp, for
Mglich), and p for p is necessarily true (Polish Lp, for Logisch). De Morgans Laws
for modal logic (where is associated with and with see McCawley 1993 for
details) can thus be stated
and

p p

(Polish ENLpMNp)

p p

(Polish ENMpLNp).
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Predicate Calculus. Quantified Predicate Calculus (both First- and Second-Order) was
first axiomatized and used notationally by Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) in 1879, a quartercentury after Boole. In predicate calculus, the atomic proposition of propositional
calculus is split into predicate and argument(s), allowing far more representation of actual
natural language phenomena. To represent predication, Frege introduced the nowstandard functional notation, widely used in mathematics. In this notation, an atomic
proposition p could now be seen to consist of a predicate (typically using upper-case
letters) operating on arguments expressed by following parenthesized variables, in the
same way as a mathematical function like f (x,y) = (x2+ y2), e.g, TALL (x) = X is tall,
SEE (x, y) = X sees Y, and GIVE (x, y, z) = X gives Y to Z.
In particular, quantifiers were separated by Frege for the first time from their traditional
Aristotelian A, E, I, O notation. Quantifiers in natural language are specialized words that
often involve special syntax; normally they appear in construction with some noun,
which they are said to bind. However, their syntax varies widely, and quantifier
ambiguities are frequent.
Modern logic admits what McCawley 1993 calls the logicians favorite quantifiers:
the existential quantifier, x, pronounced for some x or there exists an x,
and
the universal quantifier, x, pronounced for all/every/each x.
The xs in each case are dummy variables; they do no more than indicate which variable
in the proposition following is to be considered bound by the quantifier.
Quantifiers are rigidly controlled in the formulae in order to avoid ambiguity (and indeed
to allow natural language ambiguities to be explicated). They are placed before the
formula containing the variable they bind,and their relative placement serves to denote
the concept of scope, which is highly relevant to the three natural language elements
represented in logic by operators, i.e, quantification, negation, and modality, all of which
govern scope phenomena like Negative Polarity . Thus the two ambiguous readings of A
boy beat every girl at tennis are represented by (x) (y) BEAT (x, y) and (y) (x)
BEAT (x, y).
Naturally, there are variations in quantifier notation as well: a formula like De Morgans
Laws for quantifiers, which can be written ENPxxSxNx and ENSxxPxNx [Px is
(x) and Sx is (x)] in Polish notation, comes out as (x) (x) (x) (x) and
(x) (x) (x) (x) in Classical notation, which also optionally admits a simple
parenthesized variable (x) instead of (x), and also one with a circumflex hat ()
instead of (y), in the appropriate position. The use of parentheses, colons, brackets, and
other punctuation with quantifiers is inconsistent and follows individual style, which is
usually oriented towards scope delimitation.
References
Bochenski, I. M., O.P. (1948; 1960). Precis de Logique Mathematique.
Boole, George (1854). An Investigation of The Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded
the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities.
Frege, Gottlob (1879). Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete
Formelsprache des reinen Denkens.
McCawley, James D. (1993). Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know
About Logic (but were Ashamed to Ask (2nd ed).
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