Reduction of sentences to their logical forms

“Only citizens can vote.” Which of these is that sentence actually saying: that all citizens can vote, or that all voters are citizens? Ordinary English hides the answer inside a single word, ‘only’. This topic is entirely a skill: rewriting any English sentence into one of the four standard forms — A, E, I or O — so that its exact logical claim is unmistakable.

In two minutes

Reducing a sentence to logical form means rewriting it as Quantifier + Subject term + Copula + Predicate term, so that every categorical proposition reads as All/No/Some S is/is not P, with nothing about its meaning hidden in idiom.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Logic – I on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.