Exam Questions on Logic Studies for A Level Vietnamese Students

Study Guide

Summary of questions to prepare for your exams can be found under the book Luận-lý-học : các lớp đệ nhat abcd (Book, 1965) [WorldCat.org] Luận-lý-học : các lớp đệ nhá̂t abcd (Book, 1965) [WorldCat.org] 

Basic definitions for beginners

Is logic an academic discipline of Philosophy? The ideas in philosophy are often general and abstract. The four main branches of philosophy are logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and axiology. 

Logic studies the connection between evidence and conclusions which one wishes to draw from the evidence. Epistemology studies the nature of knowledge itself. 

Philosophical logic is an area of philosophy. It's a set of methods used to solve philosophical problems and a fundamental tool for the advancement of metaphilosophy. 

Philosophical logic deals with formal descriptions of ordinary, non-specialist ("natural") language, that is strictly only about the arguments within philosophy's other branches. Most philosophers assume that the bulk of everyday reasoning can be captured in logic if a method or methods to translate ordinary language into that logic can be found. Philosophical logic is essentially a continuation of the traditional discipline called "logic" before the invention of mathematical logic. Philosophical logic has a much greater concern with the connection between natural language and logic. As a result, philosophical logicians have contributed a great deal to the development of non-standard logics (e.g. free logics, tense logics) as well as various extensions of classical logic (e.g. modal logics) and non-standard semantics for such logics (e.g. Kripke's supervaluationism in the semantics of logic).

Logic and the philosophy of language are closely related. Philosophy of language has to do with the study of how our language engages and interacts with our thinking. Logic has an immediate impact on other areas of study. Studying logic and the relationship between logic and ordinary speech can help a person better structure his own arguments and critique the arguments of others. Many popular arguments are filled with errors because so many people are untrained in logic and unaware of how to formulate an argument correctly.[53][54]

Logic studies can be divided in different sub-disciplines:  

• 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. (See § Rival conceptions.) 
• Formal logic is the study of inference with purely formal content. An inference possesses a purely formal and explicit content (i.e. it can be expressed as a particular application of a wholly abstract rule) such as, a rule that is not about any particular thing or property. In many definitions of logic, logical consequence and inference with purely formal content are the same. 
• Symbolic logic is the study of symbolic abstractions that capture the formal features of logical inference, often divided into two main branches: propositional logic and predicate logic. 
• Mathematical logic 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.

Learning resources on the internet

• Audiobooks in English: LibriVox
• Links indicated on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic#External_links

(Compilation by Anh Tho Andres)