ABSTRACT
A school teacher fills in a child’s report form with information about the child’s progress. Until it is filled in, the form is blank and gives no factual information; it prescribes not what information shall be given but how it is to be presented. It is interesting to observe that Aristotle’s selection of a formal vocabulary suggests that he also was concerned to prevent confusion between grammatical and logical form. To mark the relation between subject and predicate, in his formula for a proposition, he used two Greek words that were not commonly so used in ordinary speech and were clearly intended as technical. Whereas a system of shorthand enables us to record speech in an abbreviated form, a good logical notation equips us to analyse the forms of propositions and arguments. To have constructed a completely adequate one is to have mastered the structure of logical relationships.
