Week 3

This week we learned about conjunction, disjunction, implication, and negation. Everything we did made sense as I was able to think about it in terms of programming, with which I am more familiar. The conjunction and disjunction are exactly the same as the ‘and’ and ‘or’ which are used in almost every program. Danny put stress onto the fact that logical or is not exclusive, giving another way in which it is similar to programming. Implication to me seems simply like an if statement in programming. After looking at the truth tables from lecture, the fact that P implies Q is the same as not P or Q makes sense even though it was not immediately apparent to me. Negation made sense to me conceptually from the beginning, but I had trouble with using it in practice. As with all science courses, I was able to fully grasp how to use negation and DeMorgan’s Law after doing practice questions using it.

Week One and Two

The first week of the course served as an introduction and did not really teach any completely new concepts but instead took concepts which everybody knows and put them into a mathematical form for everybody to be able to discuss and understand each other. The intro to the course reminded me of Plato's Meno in that nothing really new was taught, but instead students were shown something that they already knew but didn't know that they knew.

The second week brought on many new topics, the most interesting of which to me was vacuous truths. The idea did not really puzzle me at all but presented an interesting way of thinking which has never really concerned me in my previous schooling and everyday life. The idea of the implication being true if the antecedent is false reminds me of the idea in programming that as soon as one part of an if conditional is false the rest of the conditions will not even be checked. This at first appears to only be a technicality but actually tends to help out in programming, and I think that the same applies in the use of logic.

I feel that I did well on the quiz this week. The use of Venn diagrams to convey logical thoughts made sense to me, and the fact that the empty set always has to be considered added an interesting element to what I would otherwise consider to be a somewhat simple task. I look forward to the increase in difficulty of the problems and the new concepts which we will consider soon (although I'm sure that once they are introduced I will be scratching my head).