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this is my first questions so I apologize for any formatting mistakes.

Given the following propositions:

c: I will return to college.

j: I will get a job.

and given the sentence:

"There is no way I am returning to college."

I need to translate that sentence to a logical expression.

My thought process was that this sentence is equivalent to "Regardless of if I get a job or I do not get a job, I will not return to college."

So the logical expression I came up with so far is:

(~j V j) ? ~c

However, proposition j is not explicitly used in the given sentence, so I'm not sure if my process here is correct, also, I'm not sure what logical operator would be used to connect the compound propositions in this case.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

  • What do you mean by "given the following propositions"? Usually when propositions are "given" that means they are taken as true (for the purpose of the logical exercise), but then you seem to go on to contradict c, indicating you are not taking it as a given that it's true. Do you just mean that you are considering the two propositions as options, maybe accepting as true the proposition "c OR j"? – Hypnosifl Sep 08 '22 at 02:01
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    For "p regardless of q" one perfectly acceptable translation of it is simply "p". If you want to spell out the claim of "regardless", then you could write "p∧ (q V ~q)" assuming classic logic of course... – Double Knot Sep 08 '22 at 02:33

1 Answers1

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Classical logic

The sentence "There is no way I am returning to college" is just another way of writing "I am not returning to college." You can express this with the negation operator in the obvious way. j is not required for this, because (j v ~j) is the law of the excluded middle, and we don't need to assert a tautology (i.e. asserting a tautology does not add anything to the statement or affect its meaning).

Modal (alethic) logic

Under modal logic, we have the option of interpreting the sentence as "I necessarily will not return to college." This would put it on par with statements like "2+2=4" (i.e. statements whose truth value never changes, no matter what alternate circumstances we might imagine), which is arguably a step too far for an a posteriori statement such as "I will not return to college" - but modal logic does not prohibit this, it's just not typical.

You would write this as □~c ("c is necessarily false") or as ~◇c ("it is not possible that c is true"), which are exactly equivalent because the ◇ symbol is defined as just another way of writing ~□~. You should also be aware that there are many different modal logics, most of which are at least somewhat suitable for alethic logic (i.e. the kind of modal logic that deals with possibility and necessity). At the very least, it is typical for alethic logics to include axiom T, which states that □p ⊢ p (i.e. the box operator may be removed if it is the outermost modal operator); axiom K, which states that □(p → q) ⊢ □p → □q (i.e. the box operator distributes over the material conditional); and axiom N, which states that all theorems of first-order logic (such as the law of the excluded middle) are necessarily true (may be prefixed with a box). There are other, more elaborate axioms, but they're not universally accepted. See the SEP link above for more background on how this all works.

Kevin
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