Master Beth Tableaux: A Beginner's Guide

[EvLer]

Hello,
can anyone recommend a good source on practicing with Beth Tableaux? It is an interesting idea, but my textbook does not contain a whole lot about it.
I tried googling but it does not produce anything helpful, most of the stuff is too advanced for me.
Is it still generally applicable?
Thanks in advance.

 

[honestrosewater]

Are you also studying semantic tableaux or truth trees or something like that- it's called different things? The one not so clear explanation google turned up sounds very similar. You can find an explanation of what I'm talking about here:
http://tellerprimer.ucdavis.edu/1ch8.pdf
If that is the same thing, you can find plenty more examples. Just try the other names- truth trees, semantic tableaux.

Edit: Actually, are you just looking for practice problems? If so, you can just make up your own :) , use the arguments in your book, or there are several in the link above.

 

[EvLer]

Yeah, the link discusses the same idea. I am going through the book on my own, so I wasn't sure about other names. I'll search for that.
Thanks a lot!

 

[honestrosewater]

Sure. Do you understand how it works- why you negate the conclusion and such?

As far as constructing the tableaux, the hardest thing to keep straight is when to branch and when not to branch. I never bothered to learn all of the rules for whether to branch or not, because you only need two of them: For a disjunction, branch; For a conjunction or literal, don't branch. I just convert all of my propositions to disjunctions or conjunctions first, then construct the tableaux.
For example, you should already know that (P -> Q) <=> (~P v Q). So instead of learning the rule for implications, you can just learn the rule for disjunctions and convert your implications to disjunctions before you add them to the tableaux. Make sense?