A negation is the denial of a statement, which we indicate with the word not or a term that means the same thing.

Two simple statements joined by a connective to form a compound statement are known as a conjunction.

Remember that a statement (or claim) is an assertion that something is or is not the case. In other words, it is the kind of thing that can be either true or false. A simple statement is one that doesn’t contain any other statements as constituents. A compound statement is composed of at least two simple statements.

Here, we take up an exploration of propositional logic (or truth-functional logic)—the branch of deductive reasoning that deals with the logical relationships among statements.