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Doing first-order logic

Now that we are familiar with some of the ins and outs of first-order syntax and semantics, we can start covering the central notions of first-order logical systems. As you will see, the account will be eerily similar to the zeroth-order one above. In fact, first-order logic is an extension of zeroth-order logic, in the sense that every valid argument of zeroth-order logic is also valid in first-order logic (but not vice versa!). As with zeroth-order logic, logical notions can be formulated in two ways; semantically and syntactically. Thankfully, since first-order logic is sound and complete, just as zeroth-order logic is, we can be sure that validity and satisfiability will coincide, whether formulated semantically or syntactically.

It is important to note here that this is not a universal feature of logical systems. In fact, second-order logic is not complete, meaning that there are some arguments that are semantically valid, but not syntactically so in non-trivial systems. In other words, they cannot be deduced no matter how hard one tries.

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Learning Logic Backwards Copyright © by Peter Susanszky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.