Acknowledgements
All the students I have taught introductory logic, from 1975 to the present, have contributed to making this book what it is. I am indebted most of all to Broadview’s copy editor, Bob Martin, to an anonymous referee, to my McMaster colleagues David Hitchcock and Mark Vorobej for their detailed and helpful feedback, and to my former colleagues Phil Gasper and Victor Nuovo for their encouragement and help in the early days at Middlebury.
I am also much indebted to all my TAs, Jenn Potton, Sarah Halsted, Adam Harmer, Jayar La Fontaine, Patrick Riesterer, Jim Monier-Williams, Sheldon Hanlon, Paul Sweeney, Haixia Zhong, Qilin Li, Jeremy Proulx, Pat Bondy, Brynna Loppe, Charlene Elsby, Qiang Hao, Zuzanna Chociej, Andrew Pineau, Adam Sopuck, Mark Garron, and above all, Yussif Yakubu, for their suggestions and support; and to the following students for picking up errors: Garon Jones, Chloe Mcintosh, Alfred Cheng, Dave Marsden, Andy Jones, Shival Pawria, Peter Donald, Eric Lebel, Justin Christmas, Sandra Bouranova, Tonya Bonarenko, Massoud Abbasi, Shanda Simpson, Suzanna Curcija, Mohammed Hassan-Ali—my apologies to anyone I have forgotten!Also, I have a great debt to other textbooks. As any author of a logic text like this will attest, one of the hardest things is to find serviceable real-life examples. So I have made liberal use of examples discovered by other authors, especially Copi and Cohen’s IntroductiontoLogic (for ch. 1:7a, b, e, 9a, c, 10a-d, Ila, c, 13-15,18; ch. 2:6b, 11,13; ch. 3: 13c-h;ch. 5: 16, 18; ch. 13: 11-13; ch. 15: 10, 11, 12; ch. 16: 1-12, 16-18), PospeseFs Propositional Logic and Predicate Logic texts (for ch. 3: 5i; ch. 6: 15; ch. 8: Id, i, j, 2a, b, 4a-c, i, f; ch. 19: lp, 10,12,13), and Pospesel and Marans’s Arguments: Deductive Logic Exercises (for an example in ch. 6 and for ch. 19: la, e, k, m, n, v; ch. 16: 15).
I should also like to thank the editors and the whole production team at Broadview for their thorough job in bringing this book to fruition.
For their help in the composition of the second edition I would like to thank Nicolas Fillion and Brad Zurcher of Simon Fraser University, BC, for their positive book review in Dialogue, J.M. Keams of Cape May, NJ for his incisive criticisms of how I previously construed the relation between validity and formal validity, Garry Todd and Tom Adajian for their queries and comments, to David Wright for his witty input, and Broadview’s very conscientious anonymous reviewer of the first edition. But my main debt of gratitude is to Nic Fillion of Simon Fraser University, BC, for all his constructive remarks and many detailed suggestions for this new edition.
And, finally, thanks are also due to my colleague Elisabeth Gedge for noticing that the conclusion of my proof on the front cover seems to have been anticipated by the poet Rupert Brooke in his poem “Heaven”!