I’m in the middle of rereading my Introduction to Formal Logic pretty carefully, from cover to cover. It’s the first time really that I’ve looked at the whole book carefully since it went off to press almost five years ago. It is a slightly odd experience, though I’m finding it all rather less depressing, and I’m liking the book rather more, than I was expecting. The structure still strikes me as right (assuming, that is, you are going to do logic by trees), and some of the ways things are introduced and explained still seem felicitous. Well, I would say that, wouldn’t I.
Since I’ve got the chance to make corrections, I might as well try to pick up any other infelicities or mistakes that aren’t already in the corrections list posted on the book’s website. So far I’ve found a few additional typos and quite a few tiny ways of improving readability: but — given that I can’t start writing a significantly different book — there’s not been too much major that I’ve wanted to change. In the propositional logic part of the book, I think the main shortcoming in the printed version is in not making clear enough the classical assumptions underlying the use of truth-tables. And there are constraints on what I can say, since I’d rather not change the downstream pagination. So sorting that is my task for tomorrow.
For owners of the existing edition, it would be interesting if you’d post a bit here about these classical assumptions.