ABSTRACT
The traditional logic maintains the convention that all statements and arguments, no matter how lengthy or involved, can be analysed and shown to consist of simple propositions, or of groups of simple propositions standing in some systematic relation to each other. In the earlier chapters we dealt first with propositions, and then with that very simple kind of systematic relation of propositions that enables immediate inferences to be drawn. Only a few, however, of the inferences drawn in conversation and in scientific inquiry are of that simple kind, and in most of them we can recognize at sight a higher degree of complexity. We now advance to an examination of the systematic relations in which propositions stand to each other when playing their parts in more complex arguments.
