I pretty much had to do this one...

[mrlogic]

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Matched you, though I answered the lions and tigers question "by the book," and would choose a different answer in real life, drawing the inference from the phrasing of the question that at least one lion exists.

Also, in reality no matter how many socks you grab in the dark, you won't find a matching pair.

[mrlogic]

Indeed, the phrasing "Some tigers are not lions" strongly suggests semantically that there are some tigers that are lions, but it does not logically imply it.

[madfilkentist]

Actually, I was thinking of "all lions are mammals," which in a logic textbook doesn't say that there are any lions, but which I'd normally read as saying that there is such a thing as a lion. Yes, you can say "All werewolves are mammals" without postulating the existence of werewolves, but that's still a textbook usage which diverges from normal English.

[catalana]

But, of course, logic is a regimented artificial system. Logicians chose to interpret the universal statements (All S are P and No S are P) as being free of existence claims, but our language is inconsistent. Logic can't afford to be inconsistent (even in the non-technical sense), so they had to choose one or the other.

They did the same thing with the interpretation of the logical connectives; "A or B" is interpreted to mean "A or B or possibly both," whereas in English we have both that inclusive sense of "or" and the exclusive "A or B but not both" sense. *shrug* You have to make choices.

And now I shall turn the extracts from my philosophy 102 logic lectures off. *grin*

[madfilkentist]

I understand exactly what you're saying, and I can treat symbolic logic as a programming language and churn out the results. But I seriously disagree with the analytic philosophical tradition, which equates the cognitive tool of logic with the programming language.

But this is an argument for another time, if ever.

[redrob]

Hmm. I got 87

[mrlogic]

Part of being logical is knowing what the answer is expected to be. ;-)

Logic

[redrob]

Thats like "is the glass half empty or half full"

It's a matter of perception as well.

Michael ( mzoned )

[shikyrie]

I had some problems with this quiz as well figuring if I followed their logic, I'd get em all right (considering logic was one of the math courses I got 100% in) this quiz was flawed... but- oh well, it doesn't lower my 139 IQ any, so I'm not worried..