Genuine Enjoyment of Truth Tables

When I come across a tricky bit of logic, it brings me a certain delight to simplify it by manually drawing out truth tables. There’s a kind of elegance and satisfaction to both be able to find a simpler way to express something, and to be able to definitively prove that it’s equivalent to what you originally intended.

If only words worked the same way!

I find myself to be someone who usually knows what I mean in my own head, but also tends to think faster than I can speak. It leads to a lot of doubling back and even cutting myself off halfway, because I’ve already challenged myself and changed my mind. My written form is even more guilty of this- I am a generally fast reader, but can be a very very slow writer. There’s not only the first layer of what to say in the first place, but near unlimited opportunity to revise what you can’t in a stream of speech.

Human language is heavy with the context of the speaker’s life. There are enough shared fundamentals that we get by, but enough unique experiences that many misunderstandings, some slight and some not, slip by unattended. Truth tables have their own language, with a grammar and a vocabulary you use to put it together. It has its own assumptions (like something can only be purely true or purely false), but no one’s truth table is going to look different than yours because of your differing life experiences. You may be expressing the same thing in different ways, but you can easily show each other that you really mean the same thing.

Though if you always understood exactly what someone meant to say, life probably wouldn’t be as interesting. :)