Using Logic in Writing
owl.purdue.edu
owl.purdue.edu
Essentially it teaches you how to formalize arguments into their abstract symbolic forms, and then evaluate the argument on that form. This is a lot easier than trying to determine an argument’s validity purely from its English written version.
I used Klenk’s Understanding Symbolic Logic, but I’m sure there are more modern courses or books.
Though I would also note that most introductions to symbolic logic do ommit the (in this context) most important part: On how to translate natural language arguments to formal logic, and the other way round. This task is very much non-trivial. A few textbooks aimed at philosophers do this, though most don't.
But yes, to the degree that any such theoretical parts are part of predicate logic, they are already part of propositional logic. The former is an extension of the latter. Perhaps similar to how higher-order logic (simple type theory) extends or generalizes both propositional and first-order predicate logic.
The modern Fregean paradigm was motivated by the need for a formalism to solve mathematical problems. It was advanced from a position of complete indifference to the relationship between logic and language/grammar. However, the Aristotelian tradition that dominated logic for two thousand years before Frege is motivated explicitly by the desire to clarify, draw out, and make conspicuous the logical structures within grammar so that arguments can be better evaluated for soundness.
For a rudimentary introduction to this space, Joseph's "The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric" is a good resource. For something a bit more thorough and specifically focused on logic, Coffey's two volumes of "The Science of Logic" comes highly recommended[1][2].
[2] https://archive.org/details/thescienceoflogi01coffuoft/page/...
The rest of the book may not be as directly related, although I did find it useful to clarifying my thoughts and structuring arguments more clearly.
Where? I don't see it.
> The more something costs, the less of it people buy;
> THEREFORE the more that hiring people costs, the fewer people get hired;
> SO raising the minimum wage raises unemployment.
Case in point: At least as far back as the 17th century, many people believed that idle children were a source of crime and poverty. To combat such idleness, apprenticeships were common for children of working-class families. Child labor, rather than being viewed as exploitive, was often considered an act of charity (https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/labor-law-highligh...).
In the early 1900s, one could have argued in a similar way as yours and argue that enforcing a minimum age for workers would reduce the labor supply, leading to increased labor cost, leading to reduced profits for companies, leading to higher prices for consumers, leading to less demand for products, leading to less innovation, reduced standards of living, and so on and so forth.
Maybe that did indeed happen in the first years, but the long term effects were inarguably positive for everybody.
Don't know if it's true or not, but it should be easy to imagine why a complex issue needs more than a simple take.
Simple counter example:
If every single person in a population can employed for economic gain by an employer, even if the employer was paying minimum wage, then having a minimum wage would not change anything about employment. An employer would obviously rather make some gain of an employee than not making that gain at all, so no changes to unemployment would happen.
There are obviously ways in which employers can increase the profit they make from employees. E.g. by raising the cost of their products.
In macroeconomics it is not so simple, because the effects of a higher price for labor are felt all over the economy, leading to feedbacks that might increase overall employment. The Ford wage increase to increase demand for Ford's products is often cited - because there is a multiplier effect from economic activity even a single firm can theoretically benefit from handing out more money to its employees.
There are also arguments from near term versus long term. In the long term, economies with no access to very cheap labor feel more pressure to robotize production, leading to higher productivity and more production overall, and also might lead to a better educated workforce by simply excluding below-minimum-wage productive labor from getting any jobs, and therefore push some of them to school. Those are short term costs that have proven to lead to long term gains.
But I do also think it's not very common to assume that higher minimum wages will lead to a net increase in employment. It is more common to argue that it will lead to a better outcome (for some definition of good) in the aggregate, _even if_ it might lead to some unemployment.