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June 7, 2011 11:40 AM

Recommendations for good books to learn Symbolic Logic?

Way back as an undergrad I took a course in Symbolic Logic, using this text: Irving Copi's Symbolic Logic. I'm interested in returning to the subject; not necessarily looking to become a master logician, but would like to at least get a pretty solid working knowledge of mid-level, perhaps even advanced concepts. I still have my old book -- worth using or are there newer and better books on the market?

posted by Saxon Kane to Religion & Philosophy (9 answers total)

Nothing wrong with the Copi book. I'd also recommend Ted Sider's Logic for Philosophy. He gets into some basic modal logic, counterfactuals, etc. in addition to the stuff you'd expect.
posted by kestrel251 at 12:21 PM on June 7, 2011

My college logic book was Rudiments of Logic by Myro, Bedau, and Monroe. While not a classic, I felt that it did the job well enough.

I did the same thing you're considering and returned to this text. It's held up for me. YMMV. It's currently out of print, but it doesn't look too hard to track down a copy.
posted by bluejayway at 12:26 PM on June 7, 2011

For better or worse, lots of the texts I've used borrow Copi's rules of inference. For some reason, every time I grab a logic textbook that tries to innovate the way it conveys the material, it ends up making things less clear.

Daniel Bonevac's Simple Logic alway struck me as clear and helpful, though the sentences chosen from literature were too difficult for my... underprepared students.
posted by reverend cuttle at 12:41 PM on June 7, 2011

Language, Proof and Logic was my textbook, both as a student in the class and then as a TA one year later (my school was undergrad-only, so all the TAs were Juniors and Seniors). At any rate, I thought it was a really good book.

It also has a computer homework program that comes along with it--a cd--that I found useful. Unlike a straight-up answer key, you submit your answers to the computer and then it tells you if they're right. If they're wrong though, it just tells you they're wrong without giving you the correct answer. This can be really frustrating when you're not getting something, but it means that you have to keep working on something on your own until you've figured it out, instead of getting it wrong once and then receiving the answer. For me, working at things over time makes them stick better than just reading the answers. YMMV.
posted by colfax at 12:44 PM on June 7, 2011

I kept my copy of Copi's classic text. If you can find it, and you're more interested in a historical approach, Kneale & Kneale's "Development of Logic" is interesting. Before I used Copi though, I was a guinea pig for Paul Herrick's The Many Worlds of Logic. We used his rough notes for my class. I don't know how workable it was for a class, because I hardly attended, but learned what I needed to learn from the text alone. I later bought a copy when it was published. It also has material on modal logic which you might enjoy.
posted by Hylas at 3:02 PM on June 7, 2011

I was going to suggest most of the books that have already been mentioned, so I'll drop this link instead. It has some extra information, plus some answers to the problems in Copi's book, if you need a way to check yourself.
posted by chndrcks at 5:34 PM on June 7, 2011

Seconding Language, Proof and Logic from the perspective of someone who's TA'd a class using it. The courseware that colfax refers to, Tarski's World seemed to be pretty helpful to students as well.

If you're interested in the connections between logic and computer science (as I am), you may also want to look into learning something about constructive logic (which most introductory textbooks don't cover, for reasons that are more cultural than pedagogical); these notes look like a decent place to start.
posted by Dr. Eigenvariable at 2:27 AM on June 8, 2011

Copi tends to slur together formal and informal logic, I think. Despite the similarity in name, these are highly different things. Informal logic is about inference and good reasoning, whereas formal logic is the mathematical study of implication. If you want to advance to more rigorous logics, make sure you avoid anything that talks about informal logic. Informal logic isn't really logic at all.

Barwise and Etchemendy's Language Proof and Logic is nice for the software, and is really popular with my friends who teach logic because of it. Automated software greatly reduces grading time! Unfortunately, it seems some jerk put all the answers up online somewhere, meaning that the assignments aren't so useful any more. While there are plenty of reasons to recommend it, I think it slurs together the syntax and the semantics. ('Analytic consequence' as an inference rule? Psh!) This is done partly to help people use Tarski's World, and partly because Etchemendy himself has some unorthodox (but interesting) views about logical consequence. (He thinks that it is a logical truth that if Clifford is red then Clifford is colored.) I think it would be difficult to transition from this book to more complex logic.

Ted Sider's Logic For Philosophers is a good suggestion. I took a seminar of his using that book and got a lot out of it. The focus of that book is on learning lots of different logical systems rather than proofs. I am also a fan of Richard Jeffrey's Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits. You'll have to suffer through proofs using a tree method rather than a natural deduction system, but it is worth it for the stuff on uncomputability and register machines, which is often ignored in logic texts.
posted by painquale at 3:05 AM on June 8, 2011

Oh hold on, you have a different Copi book than the one I was thinking of. (I was thinking of this.) I haven't actually used the one you have, and it seems to be well-loved, so I retract criticisms.
posted by painquale at 4:12 AM on June 8, 2011