Tips for Translating into “Logical English”

You can’t really use logic to analyze an argument until you have translated it into what I call “logical English”. This means that every sentence has to be symbolized by a letter, and those letters have to be connected by logical operators. The best way to be sure you are doing this right is to write each sentence once, and then connect it to the letter that the sentence stands for. For example, an argument we discussed earlier is effectively written this way.

E= The economy continues to get worse

U= Unemployment will go up.

P= The poor will suffer.

If you read out loud the sentence symbolized by each letter in this example, and connect them with the words symbolized by the logical operators, you can tell that you have an argument written entirely in “logical English”. Those of us who are naturally lazy like this format because it only requires us to write each sentence once. A more important advantage, however, is that this format insures that you don’t change the meaning of the sentence symbolized by the letter. When students write the entire argument out, they often change the wording of the sentence symbolized by P or E each time it appears, in order to make the argument “work”. The fact that they need to do this shows that the argument doesn’t actually work, and probably needs to be broken down into two or three other arguments. It also might indicate that the argument can’t be made to work at all. Arguments that work only if you change the meaning of…