After taking a bit of a rest from it, I’ve been getting back to work on the Teach Yourself Logic Guide. Here then is Version 9.2 of the Guide, newly updated (pp. iii + 62). Do spread the word to anyone you think might have use for it.
The main new additions are one-page reviews of Dirk van Dalen’s Logic and Structure and Shawn Hedman’s A First Couse in Logic, but there has also been some tinkering throughout.
The previous version from 1 June has been downloaded over 2250 times in three months. That encourages me to continue putting some time and effort into the project.
[Added One small error: Manzano’s Model Theory is not out of print — just gone to the limbo where absurdly expensive now-print-on-demand books eke out a ghostly after-life.]
Professor Smith,
I came over from a Hacker News article and really like the blog. Fascinating stuff.
Do you have any plans to put the TYL or GWT on github? The latex docs versioning should work nicely on git and it would support discussions, etc.
Thanks for making your work so available like this
yrs
Michael Bubb
I’m unsure whether Etchemendy’s critique of logical consequence may form part of what you are referencing. If so, a search on this term will provide a cornucopia of articles and books.
A student should be able to identify something suitable.
One candidate is http://www.wylieb.com/Philosophy/DipArts/Etchemendy.pdf
I think Etchemendy’s worries are orthogonal to the current issue. One of his worries is that the Tarskian analysis of consequence (naturally suggested by the Taskian semantics) is extensionally wrong. But the current issue is about an apparently co-extensional way of doing the semantics.
Herbrand semantics versus Tarskian semantics. There is a discussion of this comparison in the introductory logic textbook used at Stanford, which decided to incorporate the former.
http://logic.stanford.edu/intrologic/chapters/preface.html
Prof. Smith, in your newly added commentary on van Dalen you wrote “Fine: though it would have been good if van Dalen had paused to say a little more about the pros and cons of doing [the semantics in terms of an expanded language] rather than the more common Tarskian way that students will encounter.” This got me interested and I wonder if you could point me toward discussions comparing these two approaches if you happen to know of any?
Good question: does anyone know a good student-friendly discussion?
Bostock’s /Intermediate Logic/, pp. 81ff. contains some useful discussion of this.
Thanks for the reminder! — though Bostock in fact takes a third line! (It isn’t assumed, in his version, that every element of the domain has a name, but rather than a particular name [not in the wff under consideration] can be re-interpreted to name any element.