Final answer:
De Morgan's laws are used to transform the negation of a disjunction into a conjunction of negations. The statement 'It is not the case that wishes are wings or pigs can fly' is equivalent to 'Wishes are not wings and pigs cannot fly.'
Step-by-step explanation:
The student's question involves applying De Morgan's laws to rewrite a given logical statement. De Morgan's laws concern the interactions of logical operations including conjunctions (AND) and disjunctions (OR) with negation (NOT). The statement provided by the student says "It is not the case that wishes are wings or pigs can fly." To apply De Morgan's laws, we need to negate each part of the statement within the OR operation and replace OR with AND.
Let's denote wishes are wings by W and pigs can fly by P. The original statement in symbolic form is NOT (W OR P). Applying De Morgan's law, this is equivalent to NOT W AND NOT P, which in plain English translates to "Wishes are not wings and pigs cannot fly." This transformation showcases the validity of deductive inferences when using logical operations.