Symbolic Logic

Irving Copi's Symbolic Logic is a classic text book. My comments refer to an earlier edition. I had been looking for a rigorous and well laid out reference text on logical notation. This book has been tremendous in this regard, it is comprehensive (in a classic overview sense), and extremely well written. In addition to the discussion of symbolic notation that I was seeking, I also greatly enjoyed Copi's discussion of the relationships between meta and object languages. One minor drawback (later editions may have addressed this point) is the absence of answers at the back of the text. I highly recommend this book to anyone like my self that is looking for either a reference or a review of symbolic logic. Copi also has an excellent introductory text on logic that provides a more basic and holistic look at the subject.

S. Wuest, M.S. in Computer Science, AI, Data Fusion Caveats to the Rating: 1. You had better be willing to work at this book 2. This is a classical, analytical approach 3. The terminology is not the easiest Strengths of this book: 1. Serial proof notation 2. Much emphasis on the accurate representation of ideas 3. The approach to formal logic is analytical (as opposed to brute force, "sub-logical" algorithms such as resolution). This provides a theoretical background for sound algorithm design that is lacking in programmers only familiar with resolution 4. The quantified exercises given begin to develop intuition as to the most efficient ways to combine multiple operations--such heuristics are key to designing automated proof generators. 5. I have only found about 1 error in the answers. I agree with the comment of Mayer: many technical people do not know how to accurately represent English statements in a formal logic notation. I work with engineers, and have observed the confusion of cause and effect in their rule writing, and the confusion of abductive pattern matching with deductive reasoning (abductive pattern matching is not covered in the book). Exercises in representing English sentences in symbolic logic notation would soon fix this confusion. I rate one of the strengths of Copi's notation to be the serial proof (as opposed to tree). Tree notations blows up combinatorially, and become useless for anything but toy problems. Tree notations may be more intuitive, but have too low a glass ceiling.

i too have a warm place in my heart for this classic textbook. it's true that its methods of symbolization and proofs are a bit dated nowadays, but its explanations are crystal clear, and that's nothing to sneeze at. overall, though, if you are just starting out in symbolic logic, you might find howard pospesel's books more useful and perhaps a bit cheaper. but you can't go wrong with either author.

I thourougly enjoyed learning from this book, and it became the foundation of my analytic philosophy knowledge.That said, I do not recommend this book as a text for those attempting to learn logic today. The symbolic language that is used and the mode of problem-solving demonstrated by Copi in this work is long since outdated and using this text will only confuse a logic amateur when they move on to more current and complicated logic.

My Background: Graduate Computer Science student, emphasis in complex programming.Most programmers never get beyond the first-order (unquantified) predicate calculus introduced in the standard finite math course. This text goes to the next level in formal logic, teaching how to prove or disprove that a quantified expression follows logically from a group of premises.Copi's notation is concise, leads to elegant proofs, and to proofs which are much shorter than many of the tree methods.Even if you don't feel that you have the stamina to take on quantified logic, the book is an excellent text to unquantified rules of inference. But the real wealth here is the treatment of UI, UG, EI, and EG. To become fluent with this notation requires diligently working the host of example problems in each chapter, but the result will be problem-solving abilities that are much more flexible than the abilities of mathematics alone. You may find yourself becoming addicted to formal logic! Steve