Abstract
‘Natural deduction’ is natural in virtue of the way that it allows formal proofs to closely mirror the structure of familiar ordinary language arguments.1 For example, the sentences of the ordinary language argument (1) correspond one-to-one with the lines of the proof (2):
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(1)
Whoever committed the murder left by the window. Anyone who left by the window would have had mud on his shoes. Suppose that the butler committed the murder. Then he left by the window. In that case, he has mud on his shoes. So if the butler committed the murder, he has mud on his shoes.
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References
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Mccawley, J.D. (1991). Natural Deduction and Ordinary Language Discourse Structure. In: Lewis, H.A. (eds) Peter Geach: Philosophical Encounters. Synthese Library, vol 213. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7885-1_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7885-1_12
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