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ALL
Aristotle's works in logic consisted of six treatises:

 Categories,
 On Interpretation- reflects the notion that logic was regarded as the interpretation of
thought.
 Prior Analytics (or Concerning Syllogism)
 Posterior Analytics (or Concerning Demonstration)
 Topics
 Sophistical Elenchi (or On Sophistical Refutations)
*Organon- an instrument of science

 In this treatise, Aristotle set down rules of logic dealing with statements called
propositions. A proposition is any statement that has the property of truth or
falsity.
Ex: 2+2=5 (it is false)
"Socrates was a man" is a proposition (it is true)
Propositions can be true or false and nothing in between (law of the excluded middle),
but not both true and false at the same time (law of noncontradiction).
Quantifiers are words such as every, all, and some, none, many, and few, to name a
few. These words allow a partial quantification of items to be specified. Each proposition
contains a subject and a predicate.

 All and every are called (affirmative) universal quantifiers in logic. They indicate
the totality (100 percent) of something.
*Universal affirmative propositions such as these were called de Omni, meaning all, by Latin
commentators on Aristotle.

 In logic books, the universal affirmation is often introduced to the reader as "All
S are P."

Vice Versa
"All S are P" and "All P are S," are called converse statements. They do not mean the same
thing. It is possible that one is true and the other is not.
Barbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget
 Children aged 5 and 6 have trouble with the quantifier all even when
information is graphic and visual.
 Noted the difficulty of mastering the idea of class inclusion in the youngest
children
 By ages 8 and 9, children were able to correctly answer the easier questions 100
percent of the time and produced the incorrect conversion on the more difficult
questions only 10 to 20 percent of the time.

Leonhard Euler
 Introduced the use of diagrams to illustrate or solve problems in logic.
 His diagrams were contained in a series of let ters written in 1761 to the Princess
of Anhalt-Dessau, the niece of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia.
 His letters were intended to give lessons to the princess in mechanics, physical
optics, astronomy, sound, and several topics in philosophy, including logic.
 Euler's instruction in logic is not original; rather, it is a summary of classical
Aristotelian and limited Stoic logic.

Gottfried Leibniz
 A master at law, philosophy, religion, history, and statecraft, Leibniz was two
centuries ahead of his time in logic and mathematics.
 Wrote a paper called De Formae Logicae Comprobatione per Linearum Ductus,
which contained the figures that became known as Euler's circles.

John Venn
 English logician and lecturer at Cambridge University, first published his
method of diagrams in an 1880 Philosophical Magazine article, "On the
Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and
Reasoning."

Charles Sanders Pierce


 American scientist and logician who invented a system comparable to Venn's
for analyzing more complicated propositions.

Lewis Carroll
 Devised a system resembling John Venn's—using overlapping rectangles
instead of circles—and used an O to indicate an empty cell.
Familiarity—Help or Hindrance?
Logical reasoning is supposed to take place without regard to either the sense or the truth of
the statement or the material being reasoned about. The more abstract or unfamiliar the
material, the more difficult it is for us to draw correct inferences.

Clarity or Brevity?
Since logic defines strict rules of inference without regard to content, we may be forced to
accept nonsensical statements as true due to their correct form.
Aristotle recognized that negation makes reasoning a good deal more difficult. So naturally he
addressed rules of negation.

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