OK, I have been tinkering with the opening chapters of my Introduction to Formal Logic, trying to improve them for the planned second edition. Here then are the early chapters up to and including the first Interlude, in an initial re-draft [link now removed]. Some quick notes:
- I haven’t yet revised the end-of-chapter Exercises.
- If you don’t know my book, then as in the first edition, Chapters 1 to 3 correspond roughly to e.g. the preamble chapter in Benson Mates’s book. Then Chapters 4 and 5 say something about showing invalid inference are invalid by the counterexample trick, and about showing valid inference are valid by coming up with multi-step proofs.
- The old Chapter 6 has disappeared, however, with some material working into the end of Chapter. 5. I plan now to talk more about the validity of arguments with contradictory premisses later, and no longer think it good policy to muddy the waters by discussing this too soon.
- This version, then, is 44 pages rather than 52 pages as before. I hope the result is overall crisper, clearer and better focussed, and certainly some repetition has disappeared. (To be honest, I cringe a bit at some passages in the first edition!)
- So … comments and corrections are most welcome! Regular readers here, please do, do chip in if you have anything useful to say. But also, if you have some students, beginners or recent beginners, who would be interested in giving feedback, please do point them this first excerpt from the book. In fact, encourage them by telling them that, when I asked for advice/comments on chapters from the second edition of my Gödel book, there was no correlation at all between seniority and the usefulness of suggestions.
- Comments are probably better sent by email (rather than using the comments box — since this is much easier for your writing and a bit easier for my reading). If you have lots of comments, the ideal is perhaps to return a marked-up PDF. But whatever works for you! Use ps218 at cam dot ac dot uk
- I’ll keep the current version fixed now for a few weeks, rather than revise piecemeal as comments arrive.
Enjoy, as they say!