Boole's syllogistic

Last updated
Square of opposition
In the Venn diagrams black areas are empty and red areas are nonempty.
The faded arrows and faded red areas apply in traditional logic. Square of opposition, set diagrams.svg
Square of opposition
In the Venn diagrams black areas are empty and red areas are nonempty.
The faded arrows and faded red areas apply in traditional logic.

Boolean logic is a system of syllogistic logic invented by 19th-century British mathematician George Boole, which attempts to incorporate the "empty set", that is, a class of non-existent entities, such as round squares, without resorting to uncertain truth values.

In Boolean logic, the universal statements "all S is P" and "no S is P" (contraries in the traditional Aristotelian schema) are compossible provided that the set of "S" is the empty set. "All S is P" is construed to mean that "there is nothing that is both S and not-P"; "no S is P", that "there is nothing that is both S and P". For example, since there is nothing that is a round square, it is true both that nothing is a round square and purple, and that nothing is a round square and not-purple. Therefore, both universal statements, that "all round squares are purple" and "no round squares are purple" are true.

Similarly, the subcontrary relationship is dissolved between the existential statements "some S is P" and "some S is not P". The former is interpreted as "there is some S such that S is P" and the latter, "there is some S such that S is not P", both of which are clearly false where S is nonexistent.

Thus, the subaltern relationship between universal and existential also does not hold, since for a nonexistent S, "All S is P" is true but does not entail "Some S is P", which is false. Of the Aristotelian square of opposition, only the contradictory relationships remain intact.

See also

Related Research Articles

Propositional calculus is a branch of logic. It is also called propositional logic, statement logic, sentential calculus, sentential logic, or sometimes zeroth-order logic. It deals with propositions and relations between propositions, including the construction of arguments based on them. Compound propositions are formed by connecting propositions by logical connectives. Propositions that contain no logical connectives are called atomic propositions.

In logic, the semantic principleof bivalence states that every declarative sentence expressing a proposition has exactly one truth value, either true or false. A logic satisfying this principle is called a two-valued logic or bivalent logic.

A syllogism is a kind of logical argument that applies deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion based on two propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true.

In mathematical logic, a universal quantification is a type of quantifier, a logical constant which is interpreted as "given any" or "for all". It expresses that a predicate can be satisfied by every member of a domain of discourse. In other words, it is the predication of a property or relation to every member of the domain. It asserts that a predicate within the scope of a universal quantifier is true of every value of a predicate variable.

In predicate logic, an existential quantification is a type of quantifier, a logical constant which is interpreted as "there exists", "there is at least one", or "for some". It is usually denoted by the logical operator symbol ∃, which, when used together with a predicate variable, is called an existential quantifier. Existential quantification is distinct from universal quantification, which asserts that the property or relation holds for all members of the domain. Some sources use the term existentialization to refer to existential quantification.

In logic, negation, also called the logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition to another proposition "not ", written , or . It is interpreted intuitively as being true when is false, and false when is true. Negation is thus a unary (single-argument) logical connective. It may be applied as an operation on notions, propositions, truth values, or semantic values more generally. In classical logic, negation is normally identified with the truth function that takes truth to falsity. In intuitionistic logic, according to the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation, the negation of a proposition is the proposition whose proofs are the refutations of .

In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth.

Square of opposition

In term logic, the square of opposition is a diagram representing the relations between the four basic categorical propositions. The origin of the square can be traced back to Aristotle making the distinction between two oppositions: contradiction and contrariety. However, Aristotle did not draw any diagram. This was done several centuries later by Apuleius and Boethius.

In philosophy, term logic, also known as traditional logic, syllogistic logic or Aristotelian logic, is a loose name for an approach to logic that began with Aristotle and was developed further in ancient history mostly by his followers, the peripatetics, but largely fell into decline by the third century CE. Term logic revived in medieval times, first in Islamic logic by Alpharabius in the tenth century, and later in Christian Europe in the twelfth century with the advent of new logic, and remained dominant until the advent of modern predicate logic in the late nineteenth century. This entry is an introduction to the term logic needed to understand philosophy texts written before it was expanded as a formal logic system by predicate logic. Readers lacking a grasp of the basic terminology and ideas of term logic can have difficulty understanding such texts, because their authors typically assumed an acquaintance with term logic.

Laws of Form is a book by G. Spencer-Brown, published in 1969, that straddles the boundary between mathematics and philosophy. LoF describes three distinct logical systems:

In computer science, the Boolean data type is a data type that has one of two possible values which is intended to represent the two truth values of logic and Boolean algebra. It is named after George Boole, who first defined an algebraic system of logic in the mid 19th century. The Boolean data type is primarily associated with conditional statements, which allow different actions by changing control flow depending on whether a programmer-specified Boolean condition evaluates to true or false. It is a special case of a more general logical data type —logic doesn't always need to be Boolean.

An existential graph is a type of diagrammatic or visual notation for logical expressions, proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce, who wrote on graphical logic as early as 1882, and continued to develop the method until his death in 1914.

In logic, a categorical proposition, or categorical statement, is a proposition that asserts or denies that all or some of the members of one category are included in another. The study of arguments using categorical statements forms an important branch of deductive reasoning that began with the Ancient Greeks.

Diagrammatic reasoning

Diagrammatic reasoning is reasoning by means of visual representations. The study of diagrammatic reasoning is about the understanding of concepts and ideas, visualized with the use of diagrams and imagery instead of by linguistic or algebraic means.

Connexive logic names one class of alternative, or non-classical, logics designed to exclude the so-called paradoxes of material implication. The characteristic that separates connexive logic from other non-classical logics is its acceptance of Aristotle's Thesis, i.e. the formula,

Czesław Lejewski (1913–2001) was a Polish philosopher and logician, and a member of the Lwow-Warsaw School of Logic. He studied under Jan Łukasiewicz and Karl Popper in the London School of Economics, and W.V.O. Quine.

Logical consequence is a fundamental concept in logic, which describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically follows from one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one in which the conclusion is entailed by the premises, because the conclusion is the consequence of the premises. The philosophical analysis of logical consequence involves the questions: In what sense does a conclusion follow from its premises? and What does it mean for a conclusion to be a consequence of premises? All of philosophical logic is meant to provide accounts of the nature of logical consequence and the nature of logical truth.

In logic, a quantifier is an operator that specifies how many individuals in the domain of discourse satisfy an open formula. For instance, the universal quantifier in the first order formula expresses that everything in the domain satisfies the property denoted by . On the other hand, the existential quantifier in the formula expresses that there is something in the domain which satisfies that property. A formula where a quantifier takes widest scope is called a quantified formula. A quantified formula must contain a bound variable and a subformula specifying a property of the referent of that variable.

In mathematics and mathematical logic, Boolean algebra is the branch of algebra in which the values of the variables are the truth values true and false, usually denoted 1 and 0, respectively. Instead of elementary algebra, where the values of the variables are numbers and the prime operations are addition and multiplication, the main operations of Boolean algebra are the conjunction (and) denoted as ∧, the disjunction (or) denoted as ∨, and the negation (not) denoted as ¬. It is thus a formalism for describing logical operations, in the same way that elementary algebra describes numerical operations.