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In
traditional logic,
obversion is a "type of
immediate inference in which from a given
proposition another proposition is inferred whose subject is the same as the original subject, whose predicate is the contradictory of the original predicate, and whose quality is affirmative if the original proposition's quality was negative and vice versa".Quoted definition is from: Brody, Bobuch A. "Glossary of Logical Terms".
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 5-6, p. 70. Macmillan, 1973. Also, Stebbing, L. Susan.
A Modern Introduction to Logic. Seventh edition, p.65-66. Harper, 1961, and Irving Copi's
Introduction to Logic, p. 141, Macmillan, 1953. All sources give virtually identical explanations. Copi (1953) and Stebbing (1931) both limit the application to categorical propositions, and in
Symbolic Logic, 1979, Copi limits the use of the process, remarking on its "absorption" into the Rules of Replacement in quantification and the axioms of class algebra. The quality of the inferred
categorical proposition is changed but the
truth value is equivalent to the original proposition. The immediately inferred proposition is termed the "obverse" of the original proposition, and is a valid form of inference for all types (A, E, I, O) of categorical...
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