Traditional Definition — ‘rules and fallacies’

“Law is what the legislature says it is.” That sentence uses the very word it is supposed to explain, and a first-year student can feel something is wrong with it even before naming what. Traditional logic gives that feeling a name — a circular definition — and a whole set of rules for catching every other way a definition can quietly fail.

In two minutes

Traditional logic recognises several kinds of definition — per genus et differentiam, verbal, ostensive/demonstrative, and extensive/denotative — and lays down five rules a good definition must satisfy, each with a named fallacy for breaking it: too wide, too narrow, circular, obscure/figurative, and unnecessarily negative.

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.