"The simpler — but less powerful — of the two logic systems we’ll study is called propositional logic. It has this name because the core building block is the proposition. A proposition is simply a statement that has a “truth value,” which means that it is either true or false. The statement “all plants are living beings” could be a proposition, as could “Barack Obama was the first African-American President” and “Kim Kardashian will play the title role in Thor: Love and Thunder.” By contrast, questions like “are you okay?” cannot be propositions, nor can commands like “hurry up and answer already!” or phrases like “Lynn’s newborn schnauzer,” because they are not statements that can be true or false. (Linguistically speaking, propositions have to be in the indicative mood.) We normally use capital letters to denote propositions, like: Let A be the proposition that UMW is in Virginia. Let B be the proposition that the King of England is female. Let C be the proposition that dogs are carnivores. Don’t forget that a proposition doesn’t have to be true in order to be a valid proposition (B is still a proposition, for example). It just matters that it is labeled and that it has the potential to be true or false. Propositions are considered atomic. This means that they are indivisible: to the logic system itself, or to a computer program, they are simply an opaque chunk of truth (or falsity) called “A” or whatever. When we humans read the description of A, we realize that it has to do with the location of a particular institution of higher education, and with the state of the union that it might reside (or not reside) in. All this is invisible to an artificially intelligent agent, however, which treats “A” as nothing more than a stand-in label for a statement that has no further discernible structure."