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Force Logic for Anxiety and Depression

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Force logic (F2) is a form of symbolic logic I created to apply to cognitive emotions such as anxiety and depression. It is a logic of self-defeating speech acts, so-called "performatives," embedded in these emotions.

In this post, I present self-referential symbolization for this logic with respect to anxiety and depression, introduce anxiety and depression performative transformation rules, and derivation rules. This system is itself based on logic-based therapy (LBT).

Symbols and Their Meaning in F2

There are five speech acts that are identified in F2 that are structurally part of cognitively processing anxiety and depression. These are making a perfectionistic demand on oneself, damning oneself about not satisfying this demand, catastrophizing or awfulizing about it, disavowing one’s capacity to tolerate it, and reporting a perceived fact about this possibility.

In F2, a speech act can be said to performatively entail another speech act. By performative entailment, I mean that, in performing a speech act in a series of speech acts, one also performs the next, and so forth. For example, in demanding, of myself, that I not fail, I am damning (refusing to accept) myself if I fail.

As demonstrated here, these entailments in F2 yield three anxiety transformation........

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