Summary |
A logical connective is anything that joins smaller logical expressions into larger ones. There are any number of logical connectives, depending on which logic one is using. The subcategories here (with the obvious exception of the miscellaneous leaf node) are most appropriate for classical logic, and logics which depart from classical logic only modestly, where there is a widely held intuition (with the exception of the conditional) that the linguistic connectives, "and," "or," and "not," are, at least in most respects, the equivalents of the formal logical connectives, conjunction, disjunction, and negation. However, even in classical propositional logic, there is the Sheffer stroke and the dagger, which allow the axiomatization of propositional logic with just one connective, but have no clear linguistic equivalent. As one moves further afield from classical logic, along various dimensions, one will soon discover that the variety of logical connectives is limited only by the mathematical ingenuity of the human mind. This might help explain why--with the exception of "conditionals"--there are (currently) far more entries in the miscellaneous category than there are in any of the more standard categories. |