Question

Intro to logic

What are the three most important concepts in intro to logic and explain why these concepts are important. How will you use these concepts in the future.

Answer 1

Informal logic is the study of natural language arguments. The study of fallacies is an important branch of informal logic. Since much informal argument is not strictly speaking deductive, on some conceptions of logic, informal logic is not logic at all.

Formal logic is the study of inference with purely formal content. An inference possesses a purely formal content if it can be expressed as a particular application of a wholly abstract rule, that is, a rule that is not about any particular thing or property. Traditional syllogistic logic, also known as term logic, and modern symbolic logic, the study of symbolic abstractions that capture the formal features of logical inference,are examples of formal logic. Symbolic logic is often divided into two main branches: propositional logic and predicate logic. The works of Aristotle contain the earliest known formal study of the syllogism. Modern formal logic follows and expands on Aristotle. In many definitions of logic, logical inference and inference with purely formal content are the same. This does not render the notion of informal logic vacuous, because no formal logic captures all of the nuances of natural language.

Mathematical logic is an extension of symbolic logic into other areas, in particular to the study of model theory, proof theory, set theory, and computability theory.