Thoughts, Statements and Reasons You'll notice that we began by defining logic as a certain way of thinking. We can begin to understand what that is when we realize that logical thinking essentially involves language. Thinking, understood broadly as any sort of mental activity, does not always involve the use of a natural language, like English. Of the thoughts that can be expressed in language logicians are mainly interested in those that express statements. A statement is just a sentence that it makes sense to evaluate as either true or false.
Pure logic studies the logical relations between statements.
In applied logic we are very interested in questions of implication, but we also take into account the fact that people assert logical relationships for very different purposes. C. A reason is a statement made with the intention of accomplishing one of two aims. One of these aims we call argument, the other we call explanation . These are pivotal concepts in applied logic and we will elaborate them in detail below. But for now they can be briefly distinguished as follows.