Thursday, March 18, 2010

One wonders...

...what goes through students' heads. I'm grading logic quizzes now, as I said, and one of the questions is, "Name two logicians whose work we've discussed." I had a student who put down as one of the logicians we'd studied --

Barbara Syllogism.

The work of Ms. Syllogism does indeed seem to be popular; we encounter her work everywhere.

I also had a student who, when asked to explain the difference between a proposition that is categorical and a proposition that is not categorical, wrote down that the latter comes from a hooker. I'm pretty sure that one was a deliberate joke. I'm not at all sure that the Barbara one was.