Subject: Logical Equivalence
From: "William J. Rapaport" <rapaport@buffalo.edu>
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:45:08 -0400 (EDT)

A student writes:
"When using the 'exclusive' or, is p + ~q logically equivalent to
 ~(~p AND q)?"

The quick answer is "no". The longer and better answer would say *why*
they are not equivalent. But you can figure that out yourself: Just
construct truth tables for each proposition and see if they match!

The student continues:
"(Sorry, I don't know any HTML codes for the special characters.)"

That's OK. In fact, in email messages, it's best to avoid them, because
not everyone reads email with an HTML reader. You can use the hyphen
(-) for negation, and the circumflex (^) (i.e., shift-6) for
conjunction. Or you can spell the words out as you did.