Daily Archives: September 17, 2015

The Dissection Lab & Logic

Logic may be considered as a symbolic language which represents the reasoning inherent in other languages. It does so by reducing the language of statements and arguments down into symbolic form, simplifying them such that the arrangement of the language, and thus the reasoning within it, becomes apparent. The extraneous parts of statements are removed like a biology student in the dissection lab removes the skin, muscles and organs of a frog, revealing the skeleton of bare reasoning inside.

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Categorical form & getting the subject right

Mr. Nance,

In the Introductory Logic video Lesson 12, you write this sentence on the white board: “Some days the sun just doesn’t shine.” The first rule to put this sentence into the proper form states: Identify and write the complete subject. You identified “days” as the subject. Essentials taught me to ask, “Who or what does (not) shine?” Doesn’t that mean that “the sun” is the subject? How imperative is it that the subject be identified correctly?  Continue reading Categorical form & getting the subject right