Footnotes, Gödel exercises, Purcell

I hadn’t planned to return to Introducing Formal Logic just yet. But the last week or so I’ve found myself tinkering with the opening chapters. And, sad to relate, I’ve been enjoying the tinkering. So I might continue doing just that.

The first edition of IFL concentrated on logic by trees. Many looking for a course text complained about this. The second edition, also initially published by CUP, replaced the chapters on trees with chapters on a natural deduction proof system, done Fitch-style. Which again didn’t please everyone! Because it is no longer subject CUP’s length constraints, a third edition could now cover both trees and natural deduction. The plan would be to construct the book so you can pick and choose a preferred route through the chapters (concentrating on just trees, on just ND, tackling both, or even neither).

There are so very many introductions to logic — from excellent to awful — that it is pretty unlikely that many would ever encounter my book as an official set text. So if I do push on with a full third edition, I’ll want this time to more attentively structure IFL so that it will at least provide useful additional/parallel reading to back up a wide range of courses.

And I’d like to add a few more asides along the way on the Great Dead Logicians (for fun and illumination, not out of a sense of historical piety). Ah, but where to put the asides? Weaving them into the main text can be distracting, and make an already long section too long. Endnotes are the work of the devil, bad enough in a printed book, maybe even worse in a PDF document. I’ve just been experimenting with marginal notes: but they are a very inefficient use of space, and also visually too intrusive for what are intended as supplementary asides. So old-school footnotes it will have to be.

I took a stern line in IFL (encouraged by my good friend the late Hugh Mellor, who took the view: if it really matters, put it in the main text; if it doesn’t leave it out). But I’m mellowing with age …

I’ve just received a query: What happened to the rest of the Exercises of IGT2?

Fair question. The fact is that I was rather disheartened when I initially posted the exercises and their solutions to find that they were rarely downloaded.

But I have just checked again, to find that the answers to some sets of exercises have been downloaded a few dozen times this month. It was similar in March, with different sets being the most downloaded. There were more downloads, then, than I was expecting to see. But perhaps not quite so many as to encourage me to prioritise constructing more exercise sets over all other projects. For thinking up exercises and writing solutions can be surprisingly time-consuming.

So the short answer to the query is: more exercises for IGT2 may slowly appear, a few now and then. but don’t hold your breath! My apologies to anyone out there who has been finding the exercises useful and is eager for more!

Footnotes! Non-existent Gödel exercises!! I spoil you with exciting content. And let me spoil you some more. Here is the always stunning Lea Desdandre with Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter ensemble, a trailer for their new CD coming out in September (when, hooray, we have tickets to see them performing the same repertoire at a Wigmore Hall concert). Purcell, Dido’s lament:

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