"A Smack of Irrelevance" in Inconsistent Mathematics?

Recently, some proponents and practitioners of inconsistent mathe- matics have argued that the subject requires a conditional with ir- relevant features, i.e. where antecedent and consequent in a valid conditional do not behave as expected in relevance logics —by shar- ing propositional variables, for example. Here we argue that more fine-grained notions of content and content-sharing are needed to ex- amine the language of (inconsistent) arithmetic and set theory, and that the conditionals needed in inconsistent mathematics are not as irrelevant as it is suggested in the current literature.

RELEVANCE FOR THE CLASSICAL LOGICIAN

Although much technical and philosophical attention has been given to relevance logics, the notion of relevance itself is generally left at an intuitive level. It is difficult to find in the literature an explicit account of relevance in formal reasoning. In this article I offer a formal explication of the notion of relevance in deductive logic and argue that this notion has an interesting place in the study of classical logic. The main idea is that a premise is relevant to an argument when it contributes to the validity of that argument. I then argue that the sequents which best embody this ideal of relevance are the so-called perfect sequents—that is, sequents which are valid but have no proper subsequents that are valid. Church’s theorem entails that there is no recursively axiomatizable proof-system that proves all and only the perfect sequents, so the project that emerges from studying perfection in classical logic is not one of finding a perfect subsystem of classical logic, but is rather a comparative study of classifying subsystems of classical logic according to how well they approximate the ideal of perfection.

Two Manuscripts, One by Routley, One by Meyer: The Origins of the Routley-Meyer Semantics for Relevance Logics

A ternary relation is often used nowadays to interpret an implication connective of a logic, a practice that became dominant in the semantics of relevance logics. This paper examines two early manuscripts --- one by Routley, another by Meyer --- in which they were developing set-theoretic semantics for various relevance logics. A standard presentation of a ternary relational semantics for, let us say, the logic of relevant implication R is quite illuminating, yet the invention of this semantics was fraught with false starts. Meyer's manuscript, in which he builds on some ideas from Routley's manuscript, essentially contains a relational semantics for which R^{ot} is sound and complete.

RELEVANCE LOGICS AND RELATION ALGEBRAS

Relevance logics are known to be sound and complete for relational semantics with a ternary accessibility relation. This paper investigates the problem of adequacy with respect to special kinds of dynamic semantics (i.e., proper relation algebras and relevant families of relations). We prove several soundness results here. We also prove the completeness of a certain positive fragment of R as well as of the first-degree fragment of relevance logics. These results show that some core ideas are shared between relevance logics and relation algebras. Some details of certain incompleteness results, however, pinpoint where relevance logics and relation algebras diverge. To carry out these semantic investigations, we define a new tableaux formalization and new sequent calculi (with the single cut rule admissible) for various relevance logics.