Why 1 && 2 == 2

This question was bugging me for a bit and I spent about 3 hours researching it: What is the result of the logical operation of 1 AND 2? Conversely, what is the result of the logical operation 1 OR 2? Clearly upon first look, this doesn’t make any sense to evaluate in a vacuum. In normal English, if someone were to ask you “1 AND 2 equals?”, you’d probably reply “3”. Then the OR version of the question is asked… and then it devolves to non-sense. Formal logic, however, does provide us with some explanations. Everyone is familiar with the truth table: P Q P AND Q P OR Q TrueTrueTrueTrue TrueFalseFalseTrue FalseTrueFalseTrue FalseFalseFalseFalse However, True and False are boolean values. Under the principle of bivalence, there can only be two truth values: True or False (in computers, they’re encoded as 1 or 0). I’m not going to discuss the philosophy of logic, so for the rest of this blog post let’s just accept that the logical operators AND and OR (generally) operate on boolean values.