Logic

Are there any books or videos or blogs or anything easily accessible that provide actual English translations of symbolic logic? If I could just read some straight-up translations it would be far easier for me to learn symbolic logic. I have some textbooks, but that's not what I'm looking for: I just want translations of sentences. (This was inspired by a reading of Alexander Pruss's "Incompatiblism Proved" of which I tried to paste an example sentence but was unable to do so).

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More or less every textbook I can think of has many, many translations of symbolic sentences into English. Many, though by no means all, of the translations are in the exercises, and often you need to work from answer to question, but any good text will include lots and lots of examples.

What I mean by "work from answer to question", by the way, is this: the more common kind of symbolization problem goes from English into symbols. The question will give you the English sentence, and the answer—often at the end of the chapter—will give the symbolic version. But if you look at the answer and trace it back to the question, you have just what you want. The question might ask you to put "No man is his own brother" into symbols. The answer might look like this:

~∃x(Mx ∧ Bxx)

But if you are given the answer and you know what question it answered, then you have your translation. Bear in mind that for this to work, you have to know what the letters stand for; that's often given in the question. There are many English sentences that have the same logical form, and therefore look similar or the same when translated into symbols. Notice that our symbolic sentence above could equally well be a way to say "No moose is bigger than itself."

That said, two further comments. The first is that you will get much better at reading the symbols if you spend a lot of time working in the usual order: going from English into symbols. Second, philosophy went through a patch where it was way too quick to use symbols, often without actually making things any clearer.

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