The country music theorem

Interactive Demo

Here is an interactive demo walkthrough of the proof with some explanation. You can refer to it as you work the proof yourself further below using the proof builder tool.

What are we proving?

We will prove that in a world where everyone loves either rock music or country music (or both), and there is someone who does not love rock music, there is definitely someone who loves country.

In this proof the variables such as x represent people – Garth, Jimmy, or Dolly, or whoever.

• Rock x means that person x loves rock music.
• Country x means that person x loves country music.
• forall {x. Rock x | Country x} means that every person loves rock music or country music (or both!). We read the symbol forall as “for all”.
• exists {x. Country x} means that some person exists who loves country music. We read the symbol exists as “there exists”.
  It is sometimes written as exists Country, but this way has a more familiar look.

Doing it yourself

Step by step walkthrough

We start the proof in the usual way. You should see a first step that says:

If not press the “Clear Work” button. Select the exists {x. Country x} to the left of the => in the formula (on the first line). It is highlighted in red. Several options will show in the “Basic” section of the menu as suggestions. Choose the one that uses the fact that:

forall {x. p x => q x} & exists p => exists q

Wow, what does this mean? It says, “suppose that everyone who has property p also has property q, and suppose that someone has property p. If that is all true, then there is also someone with property q. In this situation property q is “person who likes country music”.

This step fills in q as exists {x. Country x}. Soon p will become {x. not (Rock x)} (“person who does not love rock music”), but not yet.

For the condition exists p, from the menu choose the item exists {x. not (Rock x)}. The result will not be highlighted because it is part of the desired final result.

Finally, select the part of step 3 that says not (Rock x) => Country x. Now the menu offers “not (not Rock) x | Country x” as one of the options. When you select this, the proof editor will remove the “not not” double negation by simplifying, and it should indicate “✓ Proof complete.”.

Alternative

This proof works “backward”, starting with the desired conclusion (the goal). It transforms the assumptions into the ones expected, step-by-step removing ones that are not desired. It is also possible to work “forward”, starting with the expected assumptions, e.g.

((exists {x. (not (Rock x))}) & (forall {x. ((Rock x) | (Country x))})) => ((exists {x. (not (Rock x))}) & (forall {x. ((Rock x) | (Country x))}))

and transforming the conclusion into the desired one. Would you be able to create a version of this proof that works forward?