Philosophy 1200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Propositional Calculus, Formal Language, Logical Equivalence

• School: Western University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: Philosophy 1200
• Professor: Eric Desjardins

Document Summary

In order to apply our formal techniques to ordinary arguments, we must be able to translate between our natural language (english in our case) and our formal language. Simple statements are symbolized using a single capital letter that in some way describes the simple statement. We might choose the letter r to symbolize the ball is red. it is not so important which letter we choose as long as we use the same letter to stand for the same simple statement. The first step in symbolizing a compound statement of english (translating it into our language of propositional logic) is to identify the simple statements and label them. Different simple statements must be given different labels and different occurrences of the same simple statement must be given the same label. We can give a translation key for the simple statements. (209) if i am hungry then i will eat.