Customer Reviews

Essentials of Logic

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I wish I had time to write a full review, because folks should really know what they are buying when they buy this book. Or at least they should know what they are *not* buying. They are *not* buying a distilled version of the classic Copi and Cohen text.

This book has some really unfortunate errors in it. Some are just typos, others are mistakes, but by far the most offensive are the philosophical errors. The philosophical errors are found in material that has been added to or completely reworked from the original C&C text.

I'll just give a couple examples (then I'll go try to prepare for tomorrow's class in which I'll need to correct the errors in this book without completely undermining it and myself):

1. On page 59, it is claimed that arguments that beg the question are always valid, but they are also *unsound* "unless the premise is already known to be true". Of course this weird epistemic notion of soundness isn't the usual one, and isn't the one that appears earlier in the book. It doesn't matter for soundness if you *know* that the premises are true, what matters is if they *are* true. So arguments that beg the question can be sound even if we don't know the premise(s) to be true.

2. Exercise 5 on page 61 asks the student to identify the fallacy of presumption in the following: "This computer game has lots of fighting in it. You'll like it."

The solution in the back of the book for this exercise says, "Converse accident. The generalization that most people like fighting and adventure-packed computer games is a hidden premise here and is being applied illegitimately to a case it does not necessarily govern."

Forget the fact that the original sentence doesn't obviously commit *any* fallacy (this is actually a problem with many of the new examples in the text). The solution in the back of the book accuses it of converse accident, but the justification given for this accusation really would have it as *accident* not *converse accident*. (Accident is when "a generalization is applied to individual cases that it does not govern" [p. 61].)

Imagine how confused students get checking their answers in the back of the book.

3. On the bottom of page 82 and the top of page 83, two charts are given to help summarize information about the distribution of terms in categorical propositions. Of course the two charts don't agree. One has S distributed in "All S are P"; the other has it undistributed. My students drew the most natural conclusion from this: truth is relative to page number.

I could go on and give many other examples.

Errors are inevitable, but not this kind of error. Advice: Have your students pay the extra 15 or 20 bucks and get Copi and Cohen. The real Copi and Cohen.

Concise and well written, my only gripe with it is that my professor uses a slightly different version so the page numbers he always rattles off in class for homework don't match mine. I looked into this before I bought it but because it's not considered a different edition I had no choice and wanted to save $50. It was well worth it.

So I took Logic and I found this book to be very helpful. I enjoyed this class so much I decided not to resale this book. I still refer to it from time to time.

I am very pleased with the service & i hope for more progress in the future.

Ahmed Alaa