IT123 – Discrete Mathematics

Symbolic Logic and Proofs

Logic is the study of consequence. Given a few mathematical statements or facts, we would like to
be able to draw some conclusions. Mathematics is really about proving general statements (like the
Intermediate Value Theorem), and this too is done via an argument, usually called a proof. We start
with some given conditions, the premises of our argument, and from these we find a consequence of
interest, our conclusion.

The problem is, as you no doubt know from arguing with friends, not all arguments are good arguments.
A “bad” argument is one in which the conclusion does not follow from the premises, i.e., the conclusion
is not a consequence of the premises. Logic is the study of what makes an argument good or bad. In
other words, logic aims to determine in which cases a conclusion is, or is not, a consequence of a set
of premises. By the way, “argument” is actually a technical term in math (and philosophy, another
discipline which studies logic):

Arguments.

An argument is a set of statements, one of which is called the conclusion and the rest of which are called
premises. An argument is said to be valid if the conclusion must be true whenever the premises are all true. An
argument is invalid if it is not valid; it is possible for all the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false.

For example, consider the following two arguments:

If Edith eats her vegetables, then she can have a cookie.

Edith eats her vegetables.

∴ Edith gets a cookie.

Florence must eat her vegetables in order to get a cookie.

Florence eats her vegetables.

∴ Florence gets a cookie.

A proposition is simply a statement. Propositional logic studies the ways statements can interact with
each other. It is important to remember that propositional logic does not really care about the content
of the statements. For example, in terms of propositional logic, the claims, “if the moon is made of
cheese then basketballs are round,” and “if spiders have eight legs then Sam walks with a limp” are
exactly the same. They are both implications: statements of the form, P → Q.

Truth Table

Here’s a question about playing Monopoly:

If you get more doubles than any other player then you will lose, or if you lose then you must have
bought the most properties.
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True or false? We will answer this question, and won’t need to know anything about Monopoly. Instead
we will look at the logical form of the statement.

We need to decide when the statement (P → Q) ∨ (Q → R) is true. Using the definitions of the
connectives in Section 0.2, we see that for this to be true, either P → Q must be true or Q → R must be
true (or both). Those are true if either P is false or Q is true (in the first case) and Q is false or R is true (in
the second case). So—yeah, it gets kind of messy. Luckily, we can make a chart to keep track of all
the possibilities. Enter truth tables. The idea is this: on each row, we list a possible combination of T’s and
F’s (for true and false) for each of the sentential variables, and then mark down whether the statement
in question is true or false in that case. We do this for every possible combination of T’s and F’s. Then
we can clearly see in which cases the statement is true or false. For complicated statements, we will
first fill in values for each part of the statement, as a way of breaking up our task into smaller, more
manageable pieces.

Since the truth value of a statement is completely determined by the truth values of its parts and how
they are connected, all you really need to know is the truth tables for each of the logical connectives.
Here they are:

The truth table for negation looks like this:

None of these truth tables should come as a surprise; they are all just restating the definitions of the
connectives. Let’s try another one.

Example.

1. Make a truth table for the statement ¬P ∨ Q.

2. Analyze the statement, “If you get more doubles than any other player you will lose, or that if
you lose you must have bought the most properties,” using truth tables.

The statement about monopoly is an example of a tautology, a statement which is true on the basis
of its logical form alone. Tautologies are always true but they don’t tell us much about the world. No
knowledge about monopoly was required to determine that the statement was true. In fact, it is equally
true that “If the moon is made of cheese, then Elvis is still alive, or if Elvis is still alive, then unicorns have
5 legs.”

Logical Equivalence

You might have noticed that the final column in the truth table for ¬P ∨ Q is identical to the final column
in the truth table for P → Q:
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This says that no matter what P and Q are, the statements ¬P ∨ Q and P → Q either both true or both
false. We therefore say these statements are logically equivalent.

Logical Equivalence.
Two (molecular) statements P and Q are logically equivalent provided P is true precisely when Q is true. That is, P
and Q have the same truth value under any assignment of truth values to their atomic parts. To verify that two
statements are logically equivalent, you can make a truth table for each and check whether the columns for
the two statements are identical.

Recognizing two statements as logically equivalent can be very helpful. Rephrasing a mathematical
statement can often lend insight into what 202 3. Symbolic Logic and Proofs it is saying, or how to prove
or refute it. By using truth table we can systematically verify that two statements are indeed logically
equivalent.

Example:

1. Are the statements, “It will not rain or snow” and “It will not rain and it will not snow” logically
equivalent?

Notice that this example gives us a way to “distribute” a negation over a disjunction (an “or”). We have
a similar rule for distributing over conjunctions (“and”s):

De Morgan’s Laws.
¬(P ∧ Q) is logically equivalent to ¬P ∨ ¬Q.

¬(P ∨ Q) is logically equivalent to ¬P ∧ ¬Q.

This suggests there might be a sort of “algebra” you could apply to statements (okay, there is: it is called
Boolean algebra) to transform one statement into another. We can start collecting useful examples of
logical equivalence, and apply them in succession to a statement, instead of writing out a
complicated truth table. De Morgan’s laws do not do not directly help us with implications, but as we
saw above, every implication can be written as a disjunction:

Implications are Disjunctions.

P → Q is logically equivalent to ¬P ∨ Q.

Example: “If a number is a multiple of 4, then it is even” is equivalent to, “a number is not a multiple of 4 or (else)
it is even.”

With this and De Morgan’s laws, you can take any statement and simplify it to the point where
negations are only being applied to atomic propositions. Well, actually not, because you could get
multiple negations stacked up. But this can be easily dealt with:

Double Negation.
¬¬P is logically equivalent to P.

Example: “It is not the case that c is not odd” means “c is odd.”

Let’s see how we can apply the equivalences we have encountered so far.

Example.
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1. Prove that the statements ¬(P → Q) and P ∧ ¬Q are logically equivalent without using truth
tables.

Negation of an Implication.
The negation of an implication is a conjunction:

¬(P → Q) is logically equivalent to P ∧ ¬Q.

That is, the only way for an implication to be false is for the hypothesis to be true AND the conclusion to be false.

To verify that two statements are logically equivalent, you can use truth tables or a sequence of
logically equivalent replacements. The truth table method, although cumbersome, has the advantage
that it can verify that two statements are NOT logically equivalent.

Example:

1. Are the statements (P ∨ Q) → R and (P → R) ∨ (Q → R) logically equivalent?

Deductions

Earlier we claimed that the following was a valid argument:

If Edith eats her vegetables, then she can have a cookie. Edith ate her vegetables. Therefore Edith gets
a cookie.

How do we know this is valid? Let’s look at the form of the statements. Let P denote “Edith eats her
vegetables” and Q denote “Edith can have a cookie.” The logical form of the argument is then:

This is an example of a deduction rule, an argument form which is always valid. This one is a particularly
famous rule called modus ponens. Are you convinced that it is a valid deduction rule? If not, consider
the following truth table:

This is just the truth table for P → Q, but what matters here is that all the lines in the deduction rule have
their own column in the truth table. Remember that an argument is valid provided the conclusion must
be true given that the premises are true. The premises in this case are P → Q and P. Which rows of the
truth table correspond to both of these being true? P is true in the first two rows, and of those, only the
first row has P → Q true as well. And lo-and-behold, in this one case, Q is also true. So if P → Q and P
are both true, we see that Q must be true as well.