by Spencer Hall, Copyright January 03, 2009, all rights reserved. 2760 views
In the study of logic, there are two basic divisions: material and formal. Material logic is concerned with the content of arguments, and relates more directly to real world situations, as it involves the study of common fallacies. Formal logic, though not as immediately connected to everday things like propaganda, is lesser known but equally important, dealing with the structure and form of arguments. Martin Cothran’s Traditional Logic 1 and Traditional Logic 2 cover formal logic. In Traditional Logic 1, Cothran introduces the reader to a number of basic concepts in formal logic, assuming no previous knowledge of either formal or material logic. The book has a simple structure, and is divided into three parts based on the three parts of an argument: simple apprehension, judgment, and deductive inference.
The first part of the book is the shortest, containing only three chapters for simple apprehension and its verbal expression, term. Simple apprehension is merely the act of the mind in grasping a concept, while a term is the verbal expression of that concept. The chapters about simple apprehension are necessarily more abstract than the other chapters, and may cause difficulty for some students. The second section, which deals with judgment (affirming or denying something about a concept) and its verbal expression, proposition, is far more concrete and works with logical statements such as, “All men are mortal,” or “No football players are big.” It is also the longest part of the book , spanning from Chapter 4 to Chapter 9. Chapters 10 through 13 cover the last part of logical thought: deductive inference, and its verbal expression, the syllogism. The material in this section was more challenging for me, and definitely involves the most amount of thought and work of the three sections. However, it is also the part of the text that begins to connect what has been learned before with making formal arguments. Traditional Logic 1 concludes with a review chapter.
In general overview, Cothran’s work is a good primer in formal logic. It is somewhat dry at points, and I do feel that earlier on, many of the exercises are repititious and just filling up space. But on the positive side, his delivery of the concepts is relatively easy to understand, the difficulty level steadily climbs along with the student’s increasing knowledge without being overly challenging, and earlier concepts are retained by the exercises while new ones are built on. In all, I would recommend Cothran’s textbook to someone who wants a primer in formal logic and is willing to take some time and effort to work through it.
1 • Rob • January 03, 2009 • 12:38 PM
i think simple apprehension is bunk it’s based on a medieval theory of psychology
2 • Marge A • January 03, 2009 • 12:46 PM
Whats that?
3 • Scott • March 29, 2009 • 8:04 PM
The problem is the Thomistic empiricism - Cothran claims that all of our concepts are built up from sense perception. A Biblical psychology would recognize that we are born with innate categories and can apprehend concepts without the animal process of sensation. Gordon Clark, for one, would have questioned the possibility of getting from a percept to a concept. Empiricism is a godless philosophy and is riddled with difficulties.
That said, the book is useful.
4 • Martin Cothran • September 07, 2009 • 1:28 PM
Scott,
Thomas Aquinas said, “Properly speaking, neither sense nor intellect knows, but man through both.” I would be interested to know in what way that is unbiblical. Perhaps making a distinction between different kinds of empiricism, some of which are unBiblical and some of which aren’t would be helpful.
5 • Matt John • September 15, 2009 • 12:33 AM
In the methods of deductive reasoning in classical logic, “transposition is the rule of inference that permits one to infer from the truth of “A implies B” the truth of “Not-B implies not-A”, and conversely”.[1] Its symbolic expression is:
(P ? Q) ? (~Q ? ~P)[2]
The “?” is the symbol for material implication and the doubleheaded arrow “?” indicates a biconditional relationship. ccna training
The symbol “~” indicates negation. “P” and “Q” are components representing statements that form a truth functional compound proposition, where in a hypothetic proposition the first statement will be the antecedent and the last statement will be the consequent. The expression “truth function” has distinctive applications in philosophical logic and mathematical logic. This article concerns its philosophical application. (See also Transposition (mathematics))
Thanks
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