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The following deduction is perfectly valid: All animals live on Mars. (False) All humans are animals. (True) Therefore, all humans live on Mars. (False) The problem with the argument is that it is not sound. In order for a deductive argument to be sound, the argument must be valid and all the premises must be true. [3]
A sentence can be viewed as expressing a proposition, something that must be true or false. The restriction of having no free variables is needed to make sure that sentences can have concrete, fixed truth values : as the free variables of a (general) formula can range over several values, the truth value of such a formula may vary.
A statement is logically true if, and only if its opposite is logically false. The opposite statements must contradict one another. In this way all logical connectives can be expressed in terms of preserving logical truth. The logical form of a sentence is determined by its semantic or syntactic structure and by the placement of logical constants.
Presenting many cases in which the statement holds is not enough for a proof, which must demonstrate that the statement is true in all possible cases. A proposition that has not been proved but is believed to be true is known as a conjecture, or a hypothesis if frequently used as an assumption for further mathematical work.
Traditionally, a proof is a platform which convinces someone beyond reasonable doubt that a statement is mathematically true. Naturally, one would assume that the best way to prove the truth of something like this (B) would be to draw up a comparison with something old (A) that has already been proven as true. Thus was created the concept of ...
These examples, one from mathematics and one from natural language, illustrate the concept of vacuous truths: "For any integer x, if x > 5 then x > 3." [11] – This statement is true non-vacuously (since some integers are indeed greater than 5), but some of its implications are only vacuously true: for example, when x is the integer 2, the statement implies the vacuous truth that "if 2 > 5 ...
Answer: True – the key word is "may," but there are studies that support this. 43. Romaine is the best-known lettuce in the U.S. Answer: False – iceberg lettuce is the most well-known in the U ...
The predicate calculus goes a step further than the propositional calculus to an "analysis of the inner structure of propositions" [4] It breaks a simple sentence down into two parts (i) its subject (the object (singular or plural) of discourse) and (ii) a predicate (a verb or possibly verb-clause that asserts a quality or attribute of the object(s)).