Teaching syllogistic logic via a retooled Venn diagrammatical technique

College

College of Liberal Arts

Department/Unit

Philosophy

Document Type

Article

Source Title

Teaching Philosophy

Volume

40

Issue

2

First Page

161

Last Page

180

Publication Date

6-1-2017

Abstract

© Teaching Philosophy, 2017. In elementary logic textbooks, Venn diagrams are used to analyze and evaluate the validity of syllogistic arguments. Although the method of Venn diagrams is shown to be a powerful analytical tool in these textbooks, it still has limitations. On the one hand, such method fails to represent singular statements of the form, "a is F." On the other hand, it also fails to represent identity statements of the form, "a is b." Because of this, it also fails to give an account of the validity of some obviously valid arguments that contain these types of statements as constituents. In this paper, owing to the developments in the literature on Venn diagrams, we offer a way of supplementing the rules of the Venn diagram found in textbooks, and show how this retooled Venn diagram technique could account for the problem cases.

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Digitial Object Identifier (DOI)

10.5840/teachphil201771767

Disciplines

Logic and Foundations of Mathematics

Keywords

Venn diagrams

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