Thanks for reading and commenting, Mark! 😂 This post shades from language nerdery to logical nerdery, a much more exacting field. As I wrote in response to an outside comment on this post, I’m more of a logician than many writers, but I’m much more a writer than a logician—so this post takes me somewhat out of my comfort zone! Which, you know, is why I wrote it: I like learning about all sorts of things. My bio tagline here at Substack is literally “A Catholic deacon, film critic, cartooning enthusiast, and father of 7 writes too much about everything that interests him,” and I try to live up to my own billing!
P.S. It’s because of the logical side of the post that I tagged it not only “Language” but also “Curious,” a category in which I have written posts such as this!
When I worked for the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago, some of our students whined about why we taught (and hence they were expected to take) Euclid's Elements. When I taught it, I pointed to the fact that many people don't realize that "the truth (or falsehood) of the converse or inverse of a conditional statement does not follow from the truth (or falsehood) of the original statement" is alone reason enough for teaching it: there are a number of paired proofs which seem redundant at first glance, but are actually included precisely because of this point.
I knew about converse and contrapositive, but i think I've been getting inverse wrong—I thought it meant flipping only the consequent ("If it is raining, the grass is NOT wet") to produce a statement with the opposite truth value. It's much more satisfying to have the four statements in a square, as it were, though I don't find the pictures particularly helpful.
Sheesh, and I thought *I* was a grammar-and-word nerd!
Thanks for reading and commenting, Mark! 😂 This post shades from language nerdery to logical nerdery, a much more exacting field. As I wrote in response to an outside comment on this post, I’m more of a logician than many writers, but I’m much more a writer than a logician—so this post takes me somewhat out of my comfort zone! Which, you know, is why I wrote it: I like learning about all sorts of things. My bio tagline here at Substack is literally “A Catholic deacon, film critic, cartooning enthusiast, and father of 7 writes too much about everything that interests him,” and I try to live up to my own billing!
P.S. It’s because of the logical side of the post that I tagged it not only “Language” but also “Curious,” a category in which I have written posts such as this!
https://greydanus.substack.com/p/the-sleeping-beauty-problem
If I liked the column, then i get the sneakers, and if i don’t get the sneakers then i didn’t like the column?
If there were a sneakers prize, you would get the Contrapositives!
The princess didn’t kiss the frog. She threw him into the wall.
In the absence of further information, none of the conditional statements proposed so far offer us any basis for concluding what happened next.
(or didn’t!)
When I worked for the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago, some of our students whined about why we taught (and hence they were expected to take) Euclid's Elements. When I taught it, I pointed to the fact that many people don't realize that "the truth (or falsehood) of the converse or inverse of a conditional statement does not follow from the truth (or falsehood) of the original statement" is alone reason enough for teaching it: there are a number of paired proofs which seem redundant at first glance, but are actually included precisely because of this point.
Diverting indeed! I think I've gone cross-eyed (or cross-brained?).
I knew about converse and contrapositive, but i think I've been getting inverse wrong—I thought it meant flipping only the consequent ("If it is raining, the grass is NOT wet") to produce a statement with the opposite truth value. It's much more satisfying to have the four statements in a square, as it were, though I don't find the pictures particularly helpful.