Week 6 - 3 of 3

Another thing that I found useful and interesting in this week's readings was the section about "Categorical Claims". A categorical claim as stated in Epstein is one that can be rewritten as an equivalent claim that has one of the following standard forms: All S are P; Some S is P; No S is P; Some S is not P. An everyday example of each of these would be: All cellphones are wireless; No paper is a pencil; Some gymnasts are divers; Some cabinets are not brown. Though each of these are true, we don't usually reason in such ways everyday. To rewrite as categorical all you need to add is the word "thing", for instance: No paper is a pencil = No paper is a thing that is a pencil; or, Some cabinets are not brown = Some cabinet is a thing that is not brown, and so on. Categorical claims are fairly easy in the beginning but get a bit more complicated when studying further into them.