SLOG #2

The third week of class continued to cover and explain several new topics, including conjunction, disjunction, converse, negation, vacuous truth, and a more topics regarding negation. I think the most difficult part about really understanding these concepts is ignoring the habits and thought processes you have developed from using the English language, and being able to think logically in terms of expressing thoughts using symbols. I notice this continually happens since the symbols have different connotations to them then their language counterparts. For example, when we use the word "or" in an sentence, it usually implies you either choose one option or the other, but not both. However, in symbolic representation, "V" implies that either or both options could be true or false depending on the situation.

The concept that made me think the most logically this week was the concept of negation. It is a bit unnatural to try applying negation on English sentences.  However, it helped to think of negation as a sentence used to verify a statement, making sure its negation was false. One of lecture slide used this sentence as an example, "All employees earning over 110,000 are female." This is a universal quantification, so its negation must have one counter example for the negated statement to be true. Therefore, its negated sentence will be "There exists a non-female employee earning over 110,000."