Jon Barwise (1942–2000)

The software that comes with this book is really useful for teaching students, and helping them get practice with lots of proofs and translations, without needing a TA to stand over them and answer questions the whole time. Unfortunately, the book doesn't provide enough problems in any chapter. And the authors push some of their own somewhat unusual agenda - the focus on a distinction between "logical validity" and "first-order validity" certainly seems controversial. (From my understanding of the field, it seems that most people limit logic to what they call first-order validity, and make the notion of analytic consequence, to the extent that it exists, linguistic, rather than logical. One of the other TAs for the class using this said that this conceptual fuzziness turned her best student away from taking future logic classes.)

The focus on other non-logical features, like conversational implicature and the like, is certainly nice for teaching a logic course aimed at linguists and a general audience, rather than just philosophers and mathematicians. And it helps motivate the seemingly-odd truth tables for disjunction and implication. But one of my students pointed out to me that their argument for the status of disjunction as inclusive or was conceptually weak - I think it can be shored up, but not the way they did it, and not as quickly either. It's nice to have those topics available, but you should be careful about assigning them (or reading them, if you're using this book for self-study).

Of course, despite its flaws, this is certainly one of the best introductory logic texts around. For more mathematically-versed audiences I recommend Enderton, or Hodges' "Shorter Model Theory" for people with abstract algebra training. I'll have to look at Boolos, Burgess, and Jeffrey to see how that compares.… (more)