Great care is taken with the appropriate translation into logical languages of ordinary English sentences. Evaluation of these translations promotes a more effective use of ordinary language. The Principles of Deductive Logic presents symbolic logic in a fuller and more leisurely fashion than other introductory textbooks.
Early chapters cover informal material, including definition and informal fallacies.
The remainder of the text is devoted to the treatment of four distinct artificial languages. The Categorical language is the language of syllogistic logic. The Extended Categorical language enriches this first language with the symbolic connectives for conjunction and negation. Each language is accompanied by a deductive system, and is used as an instrument for exploring ordinary language, including ordinary arguments. The book contains a large number of exercises whose answers are supplied in the back of the book, and many more that can be assigned as homework.