Talk:Formal Logic

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[edit] Symbols

Right so I'm a complete n00b to all of this, but is there a reason for choosing the specific symbol set used here? In the (1) logic course I've taken and in every math course, for example, we've used a tilde for the negation. If perhaps it is my inexperience in this area that makes this symbol set appear foreign, should there not still be some explanation since the text is meant to educate beginners and not experts? Please comment soon on this; I'm very interested to know. N Vale 01:51, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

The negation is due to a TeX limitation. I could not get the tilde to display correctly in math mode. In the following examples, the "\,\!" at the end of the math mode forces the display to use TeX.

<math>~P\,\!</math> displays as

<math>\mathrm{~P}\,\!</math> displays as

<math>\mbox{~P}\,\!</math> displays as Failed to parse (lexing error): \mbox{~P}\,\!

<math>\tilde\mathrm{P}\,\!</math> displays as

Except for the tilde, I used the Tarski set which has caught on quite well with textbook authors. They are today probably more common than the Russell/Whitehead set more often seen in Wikimedia. (Note, the Tarski quantifiers are almost never used and I used the standard quantifiers.) For any choice I could have made for the sentential connectives, many readers would have find them unfamiliar or at least not their favorites. Symbol choice for sentential connectives is just not well enough standardized to avoid that problem. --JMRyan 20:28, 3 January 2006 (UTC)