November 2025
Beginner
416 pages
8h 6m
English
Content preview from Logic For Dummies, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 4
Engaging with Formal Affairs
IN THIS CHAPTER
Introducing formal logic
Defining the five logical operators
Recognizing how logic is similar to arithmetic
Translating statements from SL to English, and vice versa
If you look at a few logical arguments, which you can do in Chapter 3, you may get the sneaking suspicion that they all have a lot in common. And you’d be right. Over the centuries, logicians have examined their fair share of argument examples, and they’ve found that certain patterns of arguments come up again and again. They realized that they could capture these patterns by using a small number of symbols, and then analyze the patterns for their common features.
In this chapter, I introduce formal logic, a foolproof set of methods for determining whether an argument is valid or invalid. I show you how to represent statements with placeholders called constants and variables, and I discuss the five logical operators used for connecting simple statements to build more complex ones.
The logical operators work very much like the familiar operators in arithmetic (addition, ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.