Chapter 6, Problem 42RE

(a) Consider The statement “If Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet then someone else did.” Explain why this statement is true.

(b) Consider the statement “If Shakespeare hadn’t written Hamlet, then someone else would have.” Explain why this statement should be false in any reasonable logic.

(c) If we let s represent “Shakespeare wrote Hamlet” and e represent “someone else wrote Hamlet,” then the logic of this chapter leads us to represent either the statement of part (a) or part (b) as ~s → e. Discuss the issue of how this statement could be true in part (a) but false in part (b). Source: Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limit.