One of the difficulties new students of symbolic logic must overcome is understanding the defining truth table for the conditional, the “if/then” logical operator. The defining truth table tells us what the truth value of the proposition is, given the truth value of its component parts. For the conditional, it looks like this:

p    q     p ⊃ q
T    T         T
T    F         F
F    T         T
F    F         T

One way to defend this is to look at real-life conditional propositions with known truth values, for which we also know the truth value of the component parts. We will take our examples from the Bible. Continue reading If/Then Truth Table →