Laws of Thought

A witness says the accused was both at home and at the crime scene at the same moment. Every lawyer in the room knows, without needing a rulebook, that this cannot be true. That instinct has a name and a three-part structure — the Laws of Thought — and this is the single most repeated topic in this paper's exam history.

In two minutes

The three traditional Laws of Thought — Identity, Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle — are the basic principles that any coherent thinking must obey, and together they are the foundation on which every later rule of validity in this paper rests.

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