Thursday, February 19, 2009

Formal Logic

This is a logical error that i found in one of my school text-books :

Let's take, for example, the following statement: Some men are carpenters.

This is different from the first I statement (some dogs are vicious things) we looked at for this reason: Although there are some vicious things that are not dogs, there are no carpenters who are not men. This means that we need another kind of diagram to represent this statement.

Now, do you see my point? This propostion is very wrong, although it is true that there are other things that are vicious than dogs, but there are women carpenters in addition to men. In my opinion, these are the same type of statements. And then they go and say that it's different later in the passage, because even though not all men are carpenters, all carpenters are men. I laugh at this. I think that, in the first place, if you are going to write a book to teach people about logic and how to use it, you need to at least be smart enough to be accurate.

1 comment:

Magistra Z. said...

Good job, Katie! The author would probably backfill by saying he meant "men" in the generic human sense, but *I* think you caught him napping!