Logic & Linguistics (English)

Part I · Reading — what a sentence commits you to

Most reasoning errors begin before inference: the sentence was misread.

1. Asserted and presupposed — separate the claim under discussion from the content smuggled in as already settled.
2. Scope — enumerate the readings created by multiple quantifiers, negation, modals, and focus operators.
3. Polarity and monotonicity — determine which substitutions preserve an inference and why words such as any need particular environments.
4. Modality — identify what can, may, must, and should mean relative to an unstated background.
5. Conditionals — distinguish material, indicative, and counterfactual conditionals; separate necessary from sufficient conditions; explain why counterfactuals do not chain transitively.
6. Implicature — recover the stronger alternative a speaker declined to use, from some rather than all to the deliberately weak reference letter.
7. Vagueness — preserve a real distinction despite an unavoidable borderline; separate an unlocatable cutoff from an arbitrary category.

Part II · Structure — what holds an argument up

8. Reconstruction — extract premises, conclusion, and the suppressed premise that makes the stated inference work.
9. The load-bearing move — locate the single inferential joint on which an argument’s conclusion depends.
10. Argument architectures — reductio, dilemma, regress, inference to the best explanation, transcendental arguments, and arguments from cases.
11. Defeasibility — state the conditions under which a conclusion expires instead of defending it past its scope.
12. Evidence that discriminates — ask how much more likely evidence is under one hypothesis than its rivals; compare all hypotheses at once.
13. Causal structure — distinguish confounders, mediators, and colliders, including the correlations created by controlling for the wrong variable.
14. Resource reasoning — detect arguments that reuse consumed money, time, headcount, attention, capacity, or locks as though resources were facts.
15. Underspecification — find interpretations that satisfy the letter of a definition, metric, or specification while violating its intent.

Part III · Pressure — how arguments manipulate

Every chapter in this part separates abuse from legitimate use and examines the same move in the reader’s own reasoning, not only in an opponent’s.

16. Burden shifts — proving negatives, argument from ignorance, loaded questions, isolated demands for rigor, and insinuation with deniability.
17. Target swaps — straw men, steel-swaps, motte-and-bailey movement, and definitions whose scope changes under pressure.
18. Structural exploits — false dilemmas, false continua, slippery slopes, equivocation, composition, division, and affirming the consequent in prose.
19. Scorekeeping — Gish gallops, unfalsifiable retreat, moving goalposts, selective skepticism, cherry-picking, and true but unrepresentative facts.
20. Social pressure — manufactured urgency, escalating commitment, emotional flooding, character framing, sealioning, DARVO, audience capture, and fabricated consensus.
21. Frame control — naming the issue, choosing the default, policing relevance, extreme anchoring, and moving the apparent center of debate.

Part IV · Frames — reasoning styles worth stealing

22. Marginal reasoning — what changes with the next unit, and what is given up to obtain it?
23. Equilibrium reasoning — what happens after everyone sees the rule and changes behavior?
24. Failure-mode reasoning — what breaks first, under what load, and where is the single point of failure?
25. Legal reasoning — who bears the burden, what standard applies, and what fact distinguishes this case from the precedent?
26. Base-rate reasoning — how often does this happen before the particulars of the current case are considered?
27. Selection reasoning — how did this case become visible, and which comparable cases could never have appeared in the sample?
28. Historical reasoning — what preceded the present state, and on which earlier event does it counterfactually depend?
29. Transposition — run one live question through several frames and treat their disagreements as information.

Part V · Writing — where the thinking becomes visible

30. Writing as exposure — use the page to reveal claims that have no model, premise, or referent beneath their fluent wording.
31. Compression — reduce 1,000 words to 40 without losing the inferential structure; what disappears was decoration.
32. Form as constraint — use the memo, proof, dialogue, brief, and aphorism to force different failures out of hiding.
33. Register and stance — use hedging as calibration; track agency through nominalization and passive voice; distinguish honest uncertainty from escape.
34. Steelmanning to signature — restate an opposing view until its proponent would sign the statement unedited.

Part VI · Vocabulary — distinctions as instruments

35. Distinctions that change conclusions — type/token; de dicto/de re; ex ante/ex post; necessary/enabling; constitutive/causal; defeasible; underdetermined; orthogonal; endogenous; marginal/average; epistemic/deontic; descriptive/normative; scope; and vague/ambiguous/general.

Part VII · Limits — where the apparatus fails

36. Genuine vagueness — cases with no sharp boundary and no rewrite that honestly removes the borderline.
37. Self-reference and paradox — where a sentence’s attempt to describe its own status destabilizes ordinary evaluation.
38. Value disagreement — conflicts that are not concealed factual disputes and do not dissolve when every empirical claim is clarified.
39. Formal and informal judgment — cases where a formal treatment exists but suppresses information that competent informal judgment retains.
40. Tacit expertise — when performance depends on pattern recognition that cannot be unpacked into premises without degrading the performance.

Appendix · Formal directions not taken

Cut-elimination, Curry–Howard, Kripke-frame correspondence, categorial grammar, formal semantics notation, and completeness or incompleteness belong to the study of constructing logics. The appendix points outward rather than teaching them here.