Introduction

The special role of logic in rational inquiry

What do the elds of astronomy, economics, nance, law, mathematics, medicine, physics, and sociology have in common? Not much in the way of subject matter, thats for sure. And not all that much in the way of methodology. What they do have in common, with each other and with many other elds, is their dependence on a certain standard of rationality. In each of these elds, it is assumed that the participants can dierentiate between rational argumentation based on assumed principles or evidence, and wild speculation or nonsequiturs, claims that in no way follow from the assumptions. In other words, these elds all presuppose an underlying acceptance of basic principles of logic. For that matter, all rational inquiry depends on logic, on the ability of people to reason correctly most of the time, and, when they fail to reason correctly, on the ability of others to point out the gaps in their reasoning. While people may not all agree on a whole lot, they do seem to be able to agree on what can legitimately be concluded from given information. Acceptance of these commonly held principles of rationality is what dierentiates rational inquiry from other forms of human activity. Just what are the principles of rationality presupposed by these disciplines? And what are the techniques by which we can distinguish correct or valid reasoning from incorrect or invalid reasoning? More basically, what is it that makes one claim follow logically from some given information, while some other claim does not? Many answers to these questions have been explored. Some people have claimed that the laws of logic are simply a matter of convention. If this is so, we could presumably decide to change the conventions, and so adopt dierent principles of logic, the way we can decide which side of the road we drive on. But there is an overwhelming intuition that the laws of logic are somehow more fundamental, less subject to repeal, than the laws of the land, or even the laws of physics. We can imagine a country in which a red trac light means go, and a world on which water ows up hill. But we cant even imagine a world in which there both are and are not nine planets. The importance of logic has been recognized since antiquity. After all, no

logic and rational inquiry

logic and convention

2 / Introduction

laws of logic

goals of the book

science can be any more certain than its weakest link. If there is something arbitrary about logic, then the same must hold of all rational inquiry. Thus it becomes crucial to understand just what the laws of logic are, and even more important, why they are laws of logic. These are the questions that one takes up when one studies logic itself. To study logic is to use the methods of rational inquiry on rationality itself. Over the past century the study of logic has undergone rapid and important advances. Spurred on by logical problems in that most deductive of disciplines, mathematics, it developed into a discipline in its own right, with its own concepts, methods, techniques, and language. The Encyclopedia Brittanica lists logic as one of the seven main branches of knowledge. More recently, the study of logic has played a major role in the development of modern day computers and programming languages. Logic continues to play an important part in computer science; indeed, it has been said that computer science is just logic implemented in electrical engineering. This book is intended to introduce you to some of the most important concepts and tools of logic. Our goal is to provide detailed and systematic answers to the questions raised above. We want you to understand just how the laws of logic follow inevitably from the meanings of the expressions we use to make claims. Convention is crucial in giving meaning to a language, but once the meaning is established, the laws of logic follow inevitably. More particularly, we have two main aims. The rst is to help you learn a new language, the language of rst-order logic. The second is to help you learn about the notion of logical consequence, and about how one goes about establishing whether some claim is or is not a logical consequence of other accepted claims. While there is much more to logic than we can even hint at in this book, or than any one person could learn in a lifetime, we can at least cover these most basic of issues.

Why learn an articial language?

This language of rst-order logic is very important. Like Latin, the language is not spoken, but unlike Latin, it is used every day by mathematicians, philosophers, computer scientists, linguists, and practitioners of articial intelligence. Indeed, in some ways it is the universal language, the lingua franca, of the symbolic sciences. Although it is not so frequently used in other forms of rational inquiry, like medicine and nance, it is also a valuable tool for understanding the principles of rationality underlying these disciplines as well. The language goes by various names: the lower predicate calculus, the functional calculus, the language of rst-order logic, and fol. The last of

FOL

Introduction

Why learn an artificial language? / 3

these is pronounced efohel, not fall, and is the name we will use. Certain elements of fol go back to Aristotle, but the language as we know it today has emerged over the past hundred years. The names chiey associated with its development are those of Gottlob Frege, Giuseppe Peano, and Charles Sanders Peirce. In the late nineteenth century, these three logicians independently came up with the most important elements of the language, known as the quantiers. Since then, there has been a process of standardization and simplication, resulting in the language in its present form. Even so, there remain certain dialects of fol, diering mainly in the choice of the particular symbols used to express the basic notions of the language. We will use the dialect most common in mathematics, though we will also tell you about several other dialects along the way. Fol is used in dierent ways in dierent elds. In mathematics, it is used in an informal way quite extensively. The various connectives and quantiers nd their way into a great deal of mathematical discourse, both formal and informal, as in a classroom setting. Here you will often nd elements of fol interspersed with English or the mathematicians native language. If youve ever taken calculus you have probably seen such formulas as: > 0 > 0 . . . Here, the unusual, rotated letters are taken directly from the language fol. In philosophy, fol and enrichments of it are used in two dierent ways. As in mathematics, the notation of fol is used when absolute clarity, rigor, and lack of ambiguity are essential. But it is also used as a case study of making informal notions (like grammaticality, meaning, truth, and proof) precise and rigorous. The applications in linguistics stem from this use, since linguistics is concerned, in large part, with understanding some of these same informal notions. In articial intelligence, fol is also used in two ways. Some researchers take advantage of the simple structure of fol sentences to use it as a way to encode knowledge to be stored and used by a computer. Thinking is modeled by manipulations involving sentences of fol. The other use is as a precise specication language for stating axioms and proving results about articial agents. In computer science, fol has had an even more profound inuence. The very idea of an articial language that is precise yet rich enough to program computers was inspired by this language. In addition, all extant programming languages borrow some notions from one or another dialect of fol. Finally, there are so-called logic programming languages, like Prolog, whose programs are sequences of sentences in a certain dialect of fol. We will discuss the

logic and mathematics

logic and philosophy

logic and articial intelligence

logic and computer science

Why learn an artificial language?

4 / Introduction

articial languages

logic and ordinary language

logical basis of Prolog a bit in Part III of this book. Fol serves as the prototypical example of what is known as an articial language. These are languages that were designed for special purposes, and are contrasted with so-called natural languages, languages like English and Greek that people actually speak. The design of articial languages within the symbolic sciences is an important activity, one that is based on the success of fol and its descendants. Even if you are not going to pursue logic or any of the symbolic sciences, the study of fol can be of real benet. That is why it is so widely taught. For one thing, learning fol is an easy way to demystify a lot of formal work. It will also teach you a great deal about your own language, and the laws of logic it supports. First, fol, while very simple, incorporates in a clean way some of the important features of human languages. This helps make these features much more transparent. Chief among these is the relationship between language and the world. But, second, as you learn to translate English sentences into fol you will also gain an appreciation of the great subtlety that resides in English, subtlety that cannot be captured in fol or similar languages, at least not yet. Finally, you will gain an awareness of the enormous ambiguity present in almost every English sentence, ambiguity which somehow does not prevent us from understanding each other in most situations.

Consequence and proof

Earlier, we asked what makes one claim follow from others: convention, or something else? Giving an answer to this question for fol takes up a significant part of this book. But a short answer can be given here. Modern logic teaches us that one claim is a logical consequence of another if there is no way the latter could be true without the former also being true. This is the notion of logical consequence implicit in all rational inquiry. All the rational disciplines presuppose that this notion makes sense, and that we can use it to extract consequences of what we know to be so, or what we think might be so. It is also used in disconrming a theory. For if a particular claim is a logical consequence of a theory, and we discover that the claim is false, then we know the theory itself must be incorrect in some way or other. If our physical theory has as a consequence that the planetary orbits are circular when in fact they are elliptical, then there is something wrong with our physics. If our economic theory says that ination is a necessary consequence of low unemployment, but todays low employment has not caused ination, then our economic theory needs reassessment. Rational inquiry, in our sense, is not limited to academic disciplines, and so

logical consequence

Introduction

Essential instructions about homework exercises / 5

neither are the principles of logic. If your beliefs about a close friend logically imply that he would never spread rumors behind your back, but you nd that he has, then your beliefs need revision. Logical consequence is central, not only to the sciences, but to virtually every aspect of everyday life. One of our major concerns in this book is to examine this notion of logical consequence as it applies specically to the language fol. But in so doing, we will also learn a great deal about the relation of logical consequence in natural languages. Our main concern will be to learn how to recognize when a specic claim follows logically from others, and conversely, when it does not. This is an extremely valuable skill, even if you never have occasion to use fol again after taking this course. Much of our lives are spent trying to convince other people of things, or being convinced of things by other people, whether the issue is ination and unemployment, the kind of car to buy, or how to spend the evening. The ability to distinguish good reasoning from bad will help you recognize when your own reasoning could be strengthened, or when that of others should be rejected, despite supercial plausibility. It is not always obvious when one claim is a logical consequence of others, but powerful methods have been developed to address this problem, at least for fol. In this book, we will explore methods of proofhow we can prove that one claim is a logical consequence of anotherand also methods for showing that a claim is not a consequence of others. In addition to the language fol itself, these two methods, the method of proof and the method of counterexample, form the principal subject matter of this book.

proof and counterexample

Essential instructions about homework exercises

This book came packaged with software that you must have to use the book. In the software package, you will nd a CD-ROM containing four computer applicationsTarskis World, Fitch, Boole and Submitand a manual that explains how to use them. If you do not have the complete package, you will not be able to do many of the exercises or follow many of the examples used in the book. The CD-ROM also contains an electronic copy of the book, in case you prefer reading it on your computer. When you buy the package, you also get access to the Grade Grinder, an Internet grading service that can check whether your homework is correct. About half of the exercises in the rst two parts of the book will be completed using the software on the CD-ROM. These exercises typically require that you create a le or les using Tarskis World, Fitch or Boole, and then submit these solution les using the program Submit. When you do this, your solutions are not submitted directly to your instructor, but rather to our grad-

Tarskis World, Fitch, Boole and Submit

the Grade Grinder

Essential instructions about homework exercises