I.

MOTIVATION

Q: Which is better: eternal happiness or a ham sandwich?

A: A ham sandwich! For nothing is better than eternal happiness but of course a ham
sandwich is better than nothing, so a ham sandwich must be better than eternal happiness.

1. Arguments. Logic is the study of reasoning. When we reason, we draw a conclusion from
assumptions (or premises). For example, in Conan-Doyle’s story “Silver Blaze”, Sherlock
Holmes reasons about the missing race horse: “... he must have gone to King’s Pyland or to
Mapleton. He is not at King’s Pyland. Therefore he is at Mapleton.” Here Holmes is concluding
that Silver Blaze is at Mapleton from the assumptions that (1) he went to King’s Pyland or to
Mapleton and (2) he is not at King’s Pyland. Typically, words like ‘therefore’, ‘so’, ‘thus’,
‘hence’, and ‘accordingly’ point to conclusions, while words like ‘since’, ‘because’, and ‘for’
indicate premises.

Taken together, the premises and conclusion drawn from them constitute an argument. An
argument in this technical sense represents just the inputs (premises) and output (conclusion) of
reasoning, not the process by which the conclusion is drawn from the premises. If its premises
are not too numerous, we may represent an argument in standard form by (1) listing the premises
vertically, (2) drawing a horizontal line (which we may think of as saying ‘therefore’) underneath
the last one, and then (3) writing the conclusion beneath it. Thus, in standard form, Holmes’
argument is:

1.1 Silver Blaze went to King’s Pyland or to Mapleton.

He is not at Mapleton.
He is at King’s Pyland.

The ham sandwich joke also contains an argument: we are invited to conclude that a ham
sandwich is better than eternal happiness from the (reasonable!) assumptions that (1) nothing is
better than eternal happiness and (2) a ham sandwich is better than nothing. In standard form,
this argument is:

1.2 Nothing is better than eternal happiness.

A ham sandwich is better than nothing.
A ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness.

Sometimes arguments are strung together, as in this paragraph from “S.E.C. Says an Investor
Fleeced Stockbrokers” (The New York Times, 28 February 1995, D5):

The free riding suspected in the Morse case was a form of short selling — betting that a
stock would decline. But for a short sale to be legal under securities regulations, an investor
must either borrow the shares before selling them or already own them. The borrowing of
shares can only be done in a margin account, which Mr. Morse did not have. So, in order to
short stocks in his cash accounts at the nine brokerage firms, Mr. Morse should have already

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 owned the shares. But he did not own them, according to the S.E.C. complaint.

Here ‘So’ indicates a conclusion we are supposed to reach from information given in the two
previous sentences. We may put this argument into standard form as follows:

1.3 If short sales of stock are legal, one must own or borrow the shares before selling.
To borrow shares, one must have a margin account; and Morse did not.
If Morse’s short sales of stock were legal, he owned the shares before selling.

In the context of the article, however, this conclusion functions as a premise in a second
argument, whose conclusion is the S.E.C.’s claim that Morse’s short sales were illegal. The
other premise is given by the last sentence of the paragraph, so this larger argument may be
represented as:

1.4 If Morse’s short sales of stock were legal, he owned the shares before selling.
Morse did not own them before selling.
Morse’s short sales of stock were illegal.

In this course, we shall not extract arguments from text, as I have done here. Instead, we
deal with evaluating arguments that are already nicely packaged in standard form. (Note that
arguments 1.1-1.4 all have two premises. That is not required; arguments may have any number
of premises.)

2. Evaluating arguments. Logic is particularly concerned with evaluating reasoning: when is a

conclusion well-drawn from assumptions? We can approach this question by reflecting on the
function of reasoning. Its basic use is to discover what would (or probably would) be the case in
a hypothetical situation. This situation is described by the premises of the argument. When we
draw a conclusion from them, we are making a claim about this situation. Thus the question “Is
the conclusion well-drawn from the premises?” becomes “How likely is it that the conclusion is
true, given that the premises are true?”.

In the case of argument 1.1, for example, Holmes’ assumes – correctly or incorrectly – that
the horse went to Mapleton or to King’s Pyland and that he is not at Mapleton. These
assumptions describe a hypothetical situation in which Silver Blaze went to Mapleton or to
King’s Pyland and is not at Mapleton. What is true – or probably true – in this situation? In
reaching his conclusion, Holmes proposes that Silver Blaze is at King’s Pyland. How likely is it
that this is true? Unfortunately, we are not really in a position to say, because we don’t know
how likely it is that Silver Blaze is still wherever he went. Without making the additional
assumption that he is likely to be there, we cannot agree that Holmes’ conclusion is well-drawn.

By contrast, the conclusion of the following argument is well-drawn:

1.5 This class meets Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays only

This class meets today
Today is Monday or Wednesday

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If the premises were true, today would be Monday or Wednesday or Friday, and chances are it
would be Monday or Wednesday: the probability that it is Monday or Wednesday, given that it is
Monday or Wednesday, or Friday, is 2/3. If you didn’t know what day of the week it was but
knew (1) that this class meets MWF and (2) that this class meets today, you’d make money (at
least over the long run) betting that it was Monday or Wednesday at any odds better than 2-to-1.

If the second premise and conclusion of 1.5 are interchanged, we obtain an argument in
which the conclusion is even better drawn:

1.6 This class meets Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays only

Today is Monday or Wednesday
This class meets today

Here the probability that the conclusion is true, given that the premises are true, is 1: the
conclusion is certain to be true, if the premises are true. Such arguments – those in which the
conclusion would have to be true if the premises were true – are said to be valid. Arguments that
are not valid are invalid. The conclusion of an invalid argument may still be well-drawn if it is
likely to be true, given that the premises are true. Consider argument 1.5, which is invalid.

How about the ham-sandwich argument 1.2? It seems to be valid. Better-than is a transitive
relation -- if a is better than b and b is better than c, then a is better than c – and the premises of
the ham-sandwich argument seem to be just the two parts of the if-clause, albeit in reverse order.
If so, the probability that the conclusion is true, given that the premises are true, is 1: if the
premises were true, the conclusion would have to be true. But there is an obvious problem with
this: the premises are true (aren’t they?), but the conclusion is ridiculous. So it must be that the
argument is really invalid, contrary to appearance.

Arguments 1.3 and 1.4 are both valid. Suppose that the premises of argument 1.3 are true; to
show that its conclusion must be true, it suffices to show that Morse owned the shares under the
assumption that the sales were legal. Given this assumption, the first premise tells us that Morse
either owned or borrowed the shares he sold. The second premise tells us that he didn’t borrow
them. So under the assumption that the sales were legal, Morse owned the shares. Suppose that
the premises of argument 1.4 were true. Then we know that Morse’s sales were illegal, for
otherwise the first premise tells us that Morse owned the shares, while the second denies this, and
thus both can’t be true.

Since 1.3 and 1.4 are valid, we know that Morse’s sales were illegal, provided we know that
the premises of 1.3 and the second premise of 1.4 are true. Whether they are true is a matter of
securities law (do you need to own or borrow shares of stock in order to short-sell them? do you
need a margin account to borrow stocks?) and the facts of the Morse case (did he have a margin
account? did he own the shares he sold?).

3. Validity and possibility. Our aim in this course will be a useful understanding of the notion
of a valid argument. Now you may wonder what there is to understand about this notion. Hasn’t

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a valid argument already been adequately characterized as one in which

the conclusion would have to be true if the premises were true?

Unfortunately, the meaning of this condition is not completely transparent. If premises and
conclusion must be either true or false – that is, they can’t be neither true nor false – the
condition may be restated as:

it’s not possible for the conclusion to be false while the premises are true.

But there are various notions of possibility -- physical possibility, mathematical possibility, etc.
To which of them does ‘possible’ here refer? Depending on the meaning attached to ‘possible’,
the following arguments may be valid or invalid:

1.7 Jan is married to Pat

Jan is female
Pat is male

1.8 John’s flight from Denver to Hartford took 4:04 hours

The distance between Denver and Hartford is no more than 300,000×3,840 km.

1.9 Mary ate a turnip

Mary ate a vegetable

1.10 Some number has an irrational square root

2 has an irrational square root

Argument 1.7 turns on possibility relative to institutions. Given the traditional institution of
marriage, it is not possible for Pat to be female if Pat is married to a female. So from this
perspective, argument 1.7 is valid. However, the traditional institution is not the only possible
one. From a broader perspective that admits the possibility of gay marriage, argument 1.7 is
invalid.

Arguments 1.8 and 1.9 appeal to possibility relative to natural laws or natural kinds. Given
that the speed of light is 300,000 km/s and cannot be exceeded, it is not possible for Denver and
Hartford to be more than 300,000×3,840 km apart if it took 4 hours and 4 minutes (= 3,840
seconds) to travel from one to the other. From the perspective of the laws of physics as we know
them, argument 1.8 is valid. But different laws are imaginable and universes regulated by them
seem possible; from such a perspective, argument 1.8 is invalid. You can’t eat a turnip without
eating a vegetable, since turnip is in fact a kind of vegetable. Given kinds as they are, argument
1.9 is valid. Perhaps kinds could be otherwise, so that turnips are not vegetables, though this is
more difficult to make sense of than light traveling at a different speed than it does. From such a
perspective, argument 1.9 would be invalid.

Mathematical possibility underwrites argument 1.10. 2 has an irrational square root, and it is
hard to imagine how it could, mathematically speaking, be otherwise. Nonetheless, logicians

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would not consider argument 1.10 to be valid, because they understand ‘possible’ as logically
possible. They read the definition of validity as

It’s not logically possible for the conclusion to be false while the premises are true.

Despite being mathematically impossible, it is logically possible that some number has an
irrational square root while 2 does not. Indeed, relative to logical possibility, none of the
arguments 1.7-1.10 are valid as they stand, though they can be made so by adding premises (such
as ‘Turnips are vegetables’) that, relative to other notions of possibility, can’t be false.

This should seem a bit mysterious: just what is this notion of logical possibility? Our aim
will be to develop a clear and useful account of it. Such an account should enable us to explain
why arguments that look alike may differ in validity. For example, although it resembles the
invalid ham-sandwich argument 1.2,

1.11 Zinfandel is better than gamay

Cabernet is better than zinfandel
Cabernet is better than gamay

is valid (assuming better-than is a transitive relation). Here is another pair of look-alikes that
differ in validity:

1.12 John needs a wife

Mary is a wife
John needs Mary

1.13 This dish needs salt

NaCl is salt
This dish needs NaCl

Argument 1.13 is valid; argument 1.12 is not. We would like to know why.

4. Sentences and propositions. If we ask whether the conclusion of an argument can (logically)
be false while its premises are true, we’d best be clear about what sort of things we mean by
‘premises’ and ‘conclusion’: do we mean sentences or the propositions expressed by them?

We may think of sentences, at least initially, as concrete objects: blobs of ink on the page,
accretions of chalk on the blackboard, etc. (For some purposes, it may be better to regard such
things as inscriptions of sentences, which might in turn be identified with sets of, or with
similarity relations between, inscriptions. So conceived, sentences are not concrete but abstract.)
Propositions are the claims or statements that sentences are used to make, or the information
conveyed by them. Sentences and propositions are different. The same sentence may be used to
express different propositions; depending upon its use, ‘Visiting relatives can be boring’ says that
relatives who come to visit can be boring individuals or that going to visit relatives can be a
boring experience. The same proposition may be expressed by different sentences, for example,

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by sentences of different languages; ‘It’s raining’ in English and ‘Es regnet’ in German give the
same information.

Do arguments consist of sentences or of propositions? Here I’ll make what may seem a
bizarre choice: I’ll assume that they consist of sentences rather than propositions. I do this partly
because it’s a bit clearer what sentences are. ‘John is taller than Mary’ and ‘Mary is shorter than
John’ are clearly different sentences, since one starts with the letter ‘J’ and the other with the
letter ‘M’; do they express the same or different propositions? We cannot say without getting
clearer about propositions. More important, if sentences really express propositions, we may
hope to use sentences as proxies for propositions and not lose anything. To understand a
sentence, we must be able to extract the claim it is being used to make, which would be
impossible if the sentence did not in some way encode this claim.

5. Possible uses and possible worlds. Recall the definition of validity: it’s not logically
possible for the conclusion to be false while the premises are true. If arguments consist of
sentences, understanding validity requires understanding how true sentences can (logically) be
false and false sentences can (logically) be true. Consider, for example:

1.14 Some Democrats are married

Elizabeth Dole is a Democrat
Elizabeth Dole is married

Argument 1.14 is invalid if it is logically possible for ‘Elizabeth Dole is married’ to be false
while ‘Some Democrats are married’ and ‘Elizabeth Dole is a Democrat’ are true. ‘Elizabeth
Dole is married’ is in fact true; how could it be false? ‘Elizabeth Dole is a Democrat’ is in fact
false; how could it be true?

Truth and falsity depend both on the use of words and the way the world is. As W. V. O.
Quine notes, “It is obvious that truth in general depends on both language and extra-linguistic
fact. The statement ‘Brutus killed Caesar’ would be false if the world had been different in
certain ways, but it would also be false if ‘killed’ happened rather to have the sense of ‘begat’.”
(“Two dogmas of empiricism,” §4) This suggests two ways of understanding possible truth and
falsity:

i. The possible use understanding. ‘Elizabeth Dole is married’ could be false and ‘Elizabeth
Dole is a Democrat’ true if the words ‘Elizabeth Dole’, ‘married’, and ‘Democrat’ are used in
non-standard ways (the world remaining as it is). Imagine, for example, that ‘Elizabeth Dole’
refers to Al Gore and ‘married’ means single. Then ‘Elizabeth Dole is a Democrat’ would be
true, since Al Gore is a Democrat, while ‘Elizabeth Dole is married’ would be false, since Al
Gore is not single.

ii. The possible world understanding. ‘Elizabeth Dole is married’ could be false and
‘Elizabeth Dole is a Democrat’ true if the world were different in certain respects (words
retaining their ordinary meanings). Imagine that Elizabeth Dole divorced Bob Dole, did not
remarry, and switched to the Democratic Party. Then ‘Elizabeth Dole is a Democrat’ would be

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true, while ‘Elizabeth Dole is married’ would be false.

The possible use understanding leads to what I’ll call the possible-use account of validity:

there is no logically possible use of their constituent words under which the premises are
true and the conclusion is false, the world remaining as it is

The possible world understanding leads to what I’ll call the possible-world account:

there is no logically possible world at which the premises are true and the conclusion is
false, words being used with their ordinary meanings.

Which approach should we take? Again, I’m going to make what may seem a bizarre
choice: the possible-use approach. I do so partly because it will be easier to say what uses are
logically possible than to say what worlds are logically possible. Consider the argument:

1.15 Some mice are married

Elizabeth Dole is a mouse
Elizabeth Dole is married

It’s easy to dream up possible uses of ‘mouse’, ‘married’, and ‘Elizabeth Dole’ that make the
premises true and the conclusion false. For example, let ‘mouse’ refer to numbers, ‘married’ to
the property of being odd, and ‘Elizabeth Dole’ to 2. Then the first premise says that some
numbers are odd while the second says that 2 is a number, so that both premises are true. The
conclusion says that 2 is odd, so it is false. But can we dream up a possible world in which (1)
mice can marry and (2) Elizabeth Dole is a mouse? (1) may not be a problem, but (2) is. E. B.
White’s charming story Stuart Little notwithstanding, how could Elizabeth Dole, who is in fact
human, be a mouse? How do we have to think of Elizabeth Dole in order to make this possible?
As an immaterial soul, which may inhabit different material bodies? Then she could be a
mouse, in the sense of assuming mouse-form. Is that the correct way to think of Elizabeth Dole?
Is that what she really is?

Argument 1.15 appears to be invalid on the possible-use approach. On the possible-world

approach, it is unclear what to say about it. If Elizabeth Dole is a human organism, it appears to
be valid: since there is no possible world at which its premises are true, there is none at which its
conclusion is false while its premises are true. If Elizabeth Dole is an immaterial soul, it appears
to be invalid: there is a possible world at which some mice are married and Elizabeth Dole is
incarnated as an unmarried mouse. The possible-world approach seems to hold questions of
validity hostage to resolving difficult metaphysical problems, such as the nature of persons or
distinguishing between essential and accidental properties. If we want logic to be useful, we had
better avoid such quagmires.

Moreover, possible uses aren’t as strange as all that. The connection between a word and its
ordinary use is, after all, a matter of convention: the word ‘married’ didn’t have to mean married.
And many words have more than one use that is possible relative to the conventions of English.
Indexicals like ‘I’ and ‘now’ change their referent with the occasion of their use. There are lots

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of people named ‘John’. ‘Married’ can mean was married to or performed the marriage of.

To summarize, then, we are thinking of arguments as consisting of sentences and

considering them to be valid provided:

there is no logically possible use of their constituent words for which the premises are true
and the conclusion is false

Our working assumption will be that logically possible uses of words connect them to the actual
world, not to possible worlds. Names like ‘Elizabeth Dole’ can be used to refer to actual
individuals like Elizabeth Dole or New York City but not to fictional individuals like Sherlock
Holmes or Wotan, since they do not exist in the actual world.

6. Structural constraints on possible use. If there were no constraints at all on possible use,
every argument would be invalid: simply use the words of each premise to say that 2+2=4 and
those of the conclusion to say that 2+2=5.

To arrive at some “natural” constraints on possible uses, let’s ask how we discover whether
sentences in which words are used normally are true. It may be that some sentences are stored in
my memory with ‘true’ or ‘false’ tags attached: when I see or hear a sentence, I look it up and
read off the tag. But this cannot be the whole story. Even if we overlook the problem of how the
tags get attached in the first place, there are just too many sentences to handle in this way.
Reflect that you have never seen most of the sentences you have read up to this point in this
chapter, yet you have understood and are prepared to believe at least some of them.

A more promising account is this. When we hear or see a sentence, we (1) analyze its
structure, so as to reduce its truth to a condition on the use of constituent expressions. For
example, when we hear ‘Charles married Diana’, we process it as a relational subject-predicate
sentence, i.e., as having a structure such that the sentence is true just in case the individual which
‘Charles’ designates stands in the relation which ‘married’ designates to the individual which
‘Diana’ designates. This analysis does not by itself tell us whether the sentence is true. Rather,
it tells us what we need to find out in order to determine whether it is true. In particular, we need
to (2) find out how these constituent words ‘Charles’, ‘married’, and ‘Diana’ are used and (3)
discover whether that use meets the condition on truth.

To do (2), we appeal to the conventions of English and to the context of use. The
conventions of English allow words to be used only in certain ways – only certain uses are
possible relative to those conventions. In this case, we expect ‘Charles’ to refer to a man and
‘Diana’ to a woman; we expect ‘married’ to refer either to the was-married-to or the
performed-the-marriage-of relation. To decide between the remaining possibilities, we appeal to
context. Here context probably enables us to pick out the Prince of Wales, Lady Diana Spencer,
and the was-married-to relation as the designations of ‘Charles’, ‘Diana’, and ‘married’.

To do (3), we use our knowledge of the world to determine whether the truth condition of (1)
is fulfilled. Here we find that Charles was in fact married to Diana, so the italicized condition is

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satisfied and ‘Charles married Diana’ is true.

Roughly, (1) gives knowledge of form, while (2) gives knowledge of content. (Since (1) and
(2) together tell us what the sentence says, we might take such knowledge of form and content to
be knowledge of the proposition the sentence is used to express.) Form is really semantic
structure, and logic looks to such structure for the required constraints on possible uses. We
suppose that sentences have a semantic structure which determines (a) how its unstructured parts
(or elements) may be used in relation to one another and (b) how the truth or falsity of the
sentence depends upon such a use of elements.

(a) tells us what uses of words are (logically) possible, but, in so doing, (a) defers to (b): any
use that makes a sentence true or false in accord with (b) will be possible. For example, if we
assign a relational subject-predicate structure to ‘Charles married Diana’, we can make sense of
the sentence being true or false whenever ‘Charles’ and ‘Diana’ refer to individuals and ‘married’
refers to a relation between individuals. Thus, the uses of ‘Charles’, ‘Diana’, and ‘married’ that
are possible are those in which ‘Charles’ and ‘Diana’ refer to individuals and ‘married’ to a
relation between individuals. Such uses go far beyond what is possible according to the
conventions of English. For example, ‘Charles’ could refer to 1, ‘Diana’ to 2, and ‘married’ to
the less-than relation. In short, we’ll view most English words and phrases as hyper-indexical.

7. Where we go from here. I have developed our initial characterization of validity

the conclusion would have to be true if the premises were true

into:

there is no possible use of the elements of its sentences for which the premises are true and
the conclusion is false, in accord with their semantic structure

Obviously, this makes validity depend upon the semantic structures we’re prepared to see in
sentences. Accordingly, we need to develop a catalog of the types of semantic structures we’re
prepared to see in English sentences. This will be done after introducing some conventions for
naming expressions in chapter II.

Chapters III-VI will cover truth-functional, subject-predicate and identity, descriptive, and
quantificational structures. These are basic structures that may be assembled into more complex
structures.

Each basic structure is such that the use of an expression with that structure is a simple
function of the use of its elements. That is, the use of a structured expression is fixed in a simple
way by the use of its elements. For example, a sentence like ‘Charles married Diana’ with a
relational subject-predicate structure will be true if the individuals to which the subject-terms
‘Charles’ and ‘Diana’ refer stand in the relation designated by the predicate term ‘married’.

Associated with each basic structure will be a symbolic convention for representing it. Thus,

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if ‘c’ represents ‘Charles’, ‘d’ represents ‘Diana’, and ‘M’ represents ‘married’, then ‘M(c,d)’
will represent the relational subject-predicate sentence ‘Charles married Diana’, while ‘M(d,c)’
will represent the relational subject-predicate sentence ‘Diana married Charles’. These
conventions will allow us to construct symbolic representations of the structures of more
complex sentences. For example, if ‘e’ represents ‘eternal happiness’, ‘B’ represents ‘is better
than’ and ‘x’ represents ‘thing’, then ‘Nothing is better than eternal happiness’ will be
symbolized by ‘¬∃xB(x,e)’.

Parts of sentences that can’t be so structured are elements. The elements generated by the
structures mentioned above are names, predicates, functional expressions, variables, and – a
leftover category of sentences that resist analysis – as unstructured sentences. As suggested
above, our account of what uses of elements are possible will be very liberal; many uses which
are not possible in English will be possible in logic. Given a possible use of its elements, a
sentence will be true or false according to (i) its structure and (ii) the way the world is. If
‘Charles’ refers to NYC, ‘Diana’ to Hartford, and ‘married’ to the being-larger-in-population-
than relation, then ‘Charles married Diana’ will be true.

(Since an argument is valid if there is no possible use of its elements for which its premises
are true and its conclusion is false (the world remaining as it is), we expect the validity of an
argument to depend both upon the structure of its premises and conclusion and upon the way the
world is. However, it turns out that the influence of the world here is minimal: only the number
of individuals, not their nature, matters for validity. On a sufficiently liberal view of what
constitutes an individual, we can argue that there are infinitely many of them and that the notion
of validity is determinate.)

Once we understand basic structures, we can assemble them like Lego blocks to structure a
wide variety of English sentences. This will be done in chapter VII. In chapter VIII, we return to
logic and develop methods for determining whether formal arguments are valid. By a formal
argument, I mean one in which the English premises and conclusion are replaced by symbolic
structural representations of them. For example, a formal representation of argument 1.2 might
be:

1.15 ¬∃xB(x,e)
B(h,n)
B(h,e)

Insofar as 1.15 adequately represents the semantic structure of argument 1.2, we can ask about
the validity of the ham-sandwich by asking about the validity of the formal argument instead: can
we find individuals for ‘e’, ‘h’, and ‘n’ to refer to, a (transitive) relation for the predicate ‘B’ to
designate, and a set of individuals for the variable ‘x’ to range over so that its premises are true
and its conclusion is false?

This question may be approached directly or indirectly. The direct “semantic” approach is to
exhibit such a use or to prove that no such use exists. In this case, we can show that if ‘e’, ‘h’,
and ‘n’ (resp.) refer to 0, 1, and 2 (resp.), ‘B’ designates the less-than relation, and ‘x’ designates
(ranges over) the natural numbers, the premises are true and the conclusion is false. But we can

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also develop indirect “syntactic” methods for ascertaining whether formal arguments are valid
that make no direct appeal to the notion of truth under possible use (or to any other semantic
notion). In particular, we can show that argument 1.15 (and therefore argument 1.2) is invalid
simply by applying rules that decompose symbolic representations of structures, so as to obtain
the following array of structural representations:

¬∃xB(x,e)
B(h,n)
¬B(h,e)
¬B(e,e)
¬B(n,e)

Arrays of this sort indicate that argument 1.15 is invalid, because there is a general method for
obtaining from them a possible use that makes its premises true and its conclusion false. A proof
of the correctness and adequacy of this indirect “syntactic” method is sketched in chapter IX.

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