Confessions of a Book Store Owner

Firstly I would recommend you undergo and intense psychological evaluation. You may suffer from delusions or one or more personality disorders.

I kid, I kid. But I honestly can’t imagine learning logic from a book, outside a classroom. The ‘textbook’ I used for introductory (or informal) logic was really a loose-leaf composited by the professors at my university. I also took formal logic. The textbook our class used was The Logic Book by Merrie Bergmann et al. According to one of my colleagues, the textbook as well as the answer key can be purchased for about $6 from ABE books. 

I’ll start off assuming you don’t know what logic is. Logic is part of epistemology, which is a branch of philosophy. Epistemology is the study of what we know and how we know it. Logic is the study of valid reasoning. Logic comes in two types: Deductive and inductive logic. Inductive logic is essentially statistics (If something that is a dog has a 95% chance of having a tail, and Fido is a dog, than I can that there is a 95% chance that Fido has a tail). 

Deductive logic comes in two types: Sentential logic and predicate logic. These are both systems (math is another type of system) of symbolizing ideas in English syntax (obviously, it could be done with other languages as well). For example, I want to say that apples fall from a tree only if they are ripe. In sentential logic, it would be something like f—>r. In predicate logic, it would look like (x)(Ax—>(Fx—>Rx)), or “For all things X, if it is an apple, then if falls from a tree only if it is ripe.” 

As you can imagine, courses in logic are rather confusing and move rather quickly. My university employs several philosophy majors (myself included) to work in a room in the basement of the Philosophy department. It’s called the Logic Lab or Logic Clinic, but the room is more of a cross between an office and a library. We assist logic students. Mostly we deal with either students who haven’t read the textbook and have no idea what’s going on, or we provide emotional support and counseling for the students who have broke down and insist they will never understand logic (despite the fact that often do). Please see my page Why Do People in the Logic Lab Need Logic? for further clarification. 

Cool, who are you? :)

My first language was Creole but I stopped having contact with Creoles when I was 5 so I quickly lost my vocabulary. My primary language is English, and I consider French a ‘foreign language’ but because of my extensive exposure to Creole, French really doesn’t seem like a true foreign language. It’s almost native. I’ve been quite interested in that distinction, and loved language since I was a child. At various intervals, I attempted to teach myself German, Japanese, Roma, Russian, and Latin… there’s probably others that I am forgetting. I’ve had the most recent success with Russian, but as a child I would usually accumulate a vocabulary of 500 to 1000 words before simply getting bored and moving on to a new language… losing my abilities in the previous language. 

Now, I work in a logic lab. What I truly enjoy about logic is that it is language, symbolized. It removes all connotations (for example, the word ‘but’ is equivalent to ‘and’) and renders language into a purely objective series of subjects, predicates, and their various connectors. With a key indicating which letters symbolize which words, logic allows you to move between languages, or even to say the same this in the same language in multiple ways, using equivalencies. It’s interesting to see which sentences, although they have vastly different connotations, logically say the same thing. A very simple language example would be “If you don’t eat your vegetables, then you won’t get desert” and “You will eat your vegetables or you won’t get desert.” Even someone with no schooling in logic (namely, the child being addressed) knows that these sentences are equivalent; yet most people would not know you can make and if-then statement by using the word ‘or.’

I am also interested in linguistics because I am a writer. I write both poetry and prose, and I like using linguistics to various effects. An analogous situation: Anyone can do drugs, but a chemist has greater appreciation for what is actually causing the changes in their body and mind. Ya know? Anyone can write some words down, but a linguist understands what effect they actually have on the mind.