Logic personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

In my first term of A level Philosophy we were asked to set out an argument for God's existence as numbered premises and a conclusion. I expected this to be a formality before the interesting part, but I found that the formatting was the interesting part: once the steps were separated, it was obvious which premise the whole thing rested on, and equally obvious that disliking a conclusion is not the same as finding a fault in the reasoning. Since then I have been drawn to the machinery of argument rather than to any one debate. What appeals to me about logic is that validity can be checked, and checked by rules that do not care who is arguing. My Maths A level gave me some of the same satisfaction, but proof in mathematics is mostly used rather than examined, and I want to study the examining. Reading Wilfrid Hodges's Logic helped me see how much structure sits behind ordinary sentences, particularly his treatment of scope and how much a sentence's meaning depends on where the quantifiers sit. I have also read parts of Graham Priest's Logic: A Very Short Introduction, which introduced me to the idea that the conditional of classical logic does not match the 'if' we use in conversation, and that alternative systems are proposed and argued over rather than simply invented. That there is genuine disagreement about which logic is correct was a surprise, and it is the sort of question I would like to spend three years on. I am applying for a philosophy degree with a strong logic component because I want the technical training in formal systems alongside the philosophical questions about what makes an inference good, what consequence means, and how far ordinary reasoning can be regimented at all.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

I am studying Mathematics, Philosophy and Computer Science, which between them cover most of what I expect to need. Mathematics has been the most directly useful: the proof work in Further Pure topics, especially induction and proof by contradiction, taught me to write out a chain of reasoning so that someone else can audit each line rather than trust the general shape. I keep a habit from my maths teacher of writing the justification for every step in the margin, even when it feels laborious, and I have carried it into my philosophy essays. Philosophy has trained the other half. Our epistemology unit forced me to handle arguments I could not immediately refute, and I learned to distinguish between an objection to a premise and an objection to the inference, which is a distinction candidates in class discussion frequently blur. My coursework on free will involved reconstructing a consequence argument in standard form; the process of deciding what the unstated premises were taught me more than the essay itself. Computer Science supplied Boolean algebra, De Morgan's laws and truth tables, and also a practical feel for what happens when a condition is written slightly wrong. Writing nested if-statements is a lesson in the difference between 'and' in English and conjunction as a strict operator. I have also taught myself some set notation beyond the syllabus, working through exercises on relations and functions, since these appear constantly in logic texts and I did not want the notation to be an obstacle when I meet formal semantics properly.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

Over the summer I built a small truth-table generator in Python. It takes a propositional formula typed in as text, parses it, and prints the full table along with whether the formula is a tautology, a contradiction or neither. The parsing was the difficult part: my first version handled brackets badly and quietly mis-read anything with a nested biconditional, which I only noticed because I tested it against formulae from my textbook where I already knew the answer. Rewriting it to build a tree of subformulae took several evenings and taught me that a formula's structure is genuinely hierarchical rather than a left-to-right string. It is a modest programme, not an original one, but I understand every line of it, and I now want to extend it to check simple sequents. Alongside a classmate I run a fortnightly philosophy discussion group for Year 12 students. We each prepare a short handout, usually a single argument set out in premises, and chair the discussion in turn. Splitting the work has made it sustainable through exam terms, and I have become better at explaining an idea to someone who has not read the material, particularly when the point is formal and cannot be paraphrased loosely without losing it. On Saturdays I work at a garden centre, mostly on tills and plant care. It is not related to my subject, but dealing with customers who want a plant that will survive a shaded north-facing wall has made me quicker at asking the question behind the question. I also help with a junior badminton session at my local club, where I mainly run warm-ups and feed shuttles for footwork drills. Both jobs mean my study time is defined, so I plan my reading week by week rather than in bursts, which I expect to matter at university.

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