u3a

South Solihull

Logic

We looked at Logic.  We had listened to an  “In Our Time” episode at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b00vcqcx  that traced the history of logic from Aristotle and the Stoics through to the development of modern logic by Boole, de Morgan then Frege, Russell and others.  We looked at Aristotle’s syllogisms and at a mnemonic to work out which of the 256 possible constructions are valid (19 plus five “weak” cases).  We examined the Stoic’s Truth Functional or Propositional Logic - where propositions are “atomic” sentences, and we looked at connectives AND, OR and IMPLIES and how these may be shown and combined in truth tables.  First Order Logic “splits the atom”, looking inside the proposition for names, predicates and quantifiers.  We watched a tutorial on reading symbolic logic at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVjv0CCzHok.  Here we learnt that ¬ ∃ and ∀ mean “not” “there exists” and “all”.  We noted that First Order Logic quantifies over individuals, but quantification over properties demands second order logic.