“The Game of Logic.”

Abstract

IN the course of a review of Lewis Carroll's “Game of Logic” (p. 3), Mr. A. Sidgwick says incidentally that “In Mr. Venn's scheme propositions either tell us that a compartment is empty or tell us nothing about it.” This is not quite correct; he should have confined his statement to universal propositions. It is quite true that on the schemes of Boole and Jevons nothing is recognized but 0 and 1; nothing but the excision of a combination and the letting it stand; and they both make the attempt to express particular propositions with such resources. But I have taken particular pains to show that such a scheme of dichotomy will not suffice to represent affirmatives and negatives, universals and particulars; and that for this purpose, when we are dealing with logic on the compartmental theory, if we intend to grapple with every kind of proposition we require a threefold division. We must be able to show that a compartment is empty, that it is occupied, or that we do not know what is its state.