Level A2 · Pre-Intermediate

At the Threshold of Logic

"You uttered your words as if you do not recognize shadows, or evil either. But would you be so good as to reflect on the question: what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?" M. Bulgakov, "The Master and Margarita"

If the world couldn't be divided into classes, we couldn't tell objects, events or relations apart at all — the universe would collapse into a single point. Level A2 builds the machinery for that division: what a mathematical concept actually is, how logic and naive set theory turn out to be two sides of one coin, and how relations sharpen into orders, equivalences and functions.

What you'll learn

1. Why divide the world at all?

The chapter opens with Woland's rebuke to a character in Bulgakov who wants good without evil, light without shadow — and uses it to make a formal point: if everything we could possibly describe couldn't be split into at least two classes, we could never tell objects, events, or relations apart. Logic, in the broadest sense used here, is exactly the complex of rules that lets us draw those distinctions — separate the essential from the accidental, and find structure in a body of knowledge.

But a naive "correct lexemes are true, everything else is false" logic of syntax alone isn't enough: it can recognize well-formed expressions but says nothing about the world they describe. What's needed is a four-stage recipe — build a language fragment, define its terms and formulas, fix rules of inference, and declare a starting set of axioms — the same scheme the rest of the book keeps re-applying to new subject domains.

2. Logic and sets are the same coin

Once truth and falsity are pinned to the satisfaction of a predicate, a striking pattern falls out: every logical connective used to define a new concept corresponds exactly to a set-theoretic operation on its extension.

$\land$
$\cap$
AND / intersection
$\lor$
$\cup$
OR / union
$\neg$
$\mathcal U\setminus V$
NOT / complement
$\to$
$(\mathcal U\setminus V_1)\cup V_2$
implies / (a subtler union)

The first three are immediate: define a concept as "$a$ satisfies $\mathcal D_1$ and $\mathcal D_2$" and its extension is exactly $V_1\cap V_2$; swap and for or and intersection becomes union. Implication is the interesting case, precisely because mathematics defines it so differently from everyday speech: the formula $\mathcal D_1(a)\to\mathcal D_2(a)$ is true not only when both properties hold, but also for every $a$ that simply fails $\mathcal D_1$ — vacuously true, the way "if it rains, the ground is wet" is trivially true on a sunny day. Work out the extension carefully and implication corresponds to $(\mathcal U\setminus V_1)\cup V_2$; only in the special case where the implication is a tautology does it collapse to plain inclusion, $V_1\subseteq V_2$.

That correspondence is why the chapter can introduce a full toolkit of relations almost for free. A relation is just a set of tuples $\langle x,y\rangle$ satisfying some property, and depending on which of reflexivity, symmetry, transitivity and antisymmetry it has, it earns a name: an equivalence relation (all three of the first) partitions a universe into classes — "having the same father" splits people into sibling groups; a reflexive, antisymmetric, transitive relation is a partial order; add connexity and it's a linear order. A relation that is total and single-valued is simply a function — the familiar $f:A\to B$ is just a very disciplined kind of set.

3. Try it yourself

The first five exercises from the chapter's problem set, from the English edition.

  1. Classify the following expressions into three categories: True proposition, False proposition, or Predicate (truth depends on the value of variables).
    • $2 + 2 = 5$
    • $x + 1 = 5$
    • All prime numbers are odd.
    • $5 > 3$
  2. Write the negation of the following statements (without just adding "It is not true that..."):
    • All cats are black.
    • Some students like mathematics.
    • If it rains, the ground is wet.
  3. Let $A = \{1, 2, 3\}$ and $B = \{2, 3, 4\}$. Determine the truth value of the following formulas:
    • $\forall x \in A\ (x < 4)$
    • $\exists x \in B\ (x \text{ is even})$
    • $\forall x \in A \cap B\ (x \ge 2)$
  4. Determine whether the "if... then..." construction is a material implication or a relevance implication. Does the consequent logically or semantically follow from the antecedent, usually sharing a common variable?
    • If a number $n$ is divisible by 6, then $n$ is divisible by 3.
    • If the Eiffel Tower is in Paris, then snow is white.
    • If a person is a grandmother, then she is female.
  5. Check if the following logical inference is valid using a Venn diagram or logical reasoning: "All squares are rectangles. All rectangles are quadrilaterals. Therefore, all squares are quadrilaterals."

Level A2 has 22 exercises in total, each with a full worked solution in the book's appendix.

The rest of Level A2 — and three more levels

This digest skips the full treatment of concept extension and Venn-style reasoning, the complete rules for building quantified formulas, Hasse diagrams for visualizing orders, and a careful dissection of why material implication differs from the "relevance" implication of ordinary speech. Levels B1 through C1 take this same rigor from formal propositional and predicate logic all the way to the Axiom of Choice.

← Level A1 — Survival Level B1 — Formal Logic →