Rewriting the History of Connexive Logic

The “official” history of connexive logic was written in 2012 by Storrs McCall who argued that connexive logic was founded by ancient logicians like Aristotle, Chrysippus, and Boethius; that it was further developed by medieval logicians like Abelard, Kilwardby, and Paul of Venice; and that it was rediscovered in the 19th and twentieth century by Lewis Carroll, Hugh MacColl, Frank P. Ramsey, and Everett J. Nelson. From 1960 onwards, connexive logic was finally transformed into non-classical calculi which partly concur with systems of relevance logic and paraconsistent logic. In this paper it will be argued that McCall’s historical analysis is fundamentally mistaken since it doesn’t take into account two versions of connexivism. While “humble” connexivism maintains that connexive properties (like the condition that no proposition implies its own negation) only apply to “normal” (e.g., self-consistent) antecedents, “hardcore” connexivism insists that they also hold for “abnormal” propositions. It is shown that the overwhelming majority of the forerunners of connexive logic were only “humble” connexivists. Their ideas concerning (“humbly”) connexive implication don’t give rise, however, to anything like a non-classical logic.

Sugihara algebras and Sugihara monoids: Multisorted dualities

The authors developed in a recent paper natural dualities for finitely generated quasivarieties of Sugihara algebras. They thereby identified the admissibility algebras for these quasivarieties which, via the Test Spaces Method devised by Cabrer et al., give access to a viable method for studying admissible rules within relevance logic, specifically for extensions of the deductive system R-mingle.This paper builds on the work already done on the theory of natural dualities for Sugihara algebras. Its purpose is to provide an integrated suite of multisorted duality theorems of a uniform type, encompassing finitely generated quasivarieties and varieties of both Sugihara algebras and Sugihara monoids, and embracing both the odd and the even cases. The overarching theoretical framework of multisorted duality theory developed here leads on to amenable representations of free algebras. More widely, it provides a springboard to further applications.

A Note on the Relevance of Semilattice Relevance Logic

A propositional logic has the variable sharing property if φ → ψ is a theorem only if φ and ψ share some propositional variable(s). In this note, I prove that positive semilattice relevance logic (R+u) and its extension with an involution negation (R¬u) have the variable sharing property (as these systems are not subsystems of R, these results are not automatically entailed by the fact that R satisfies the variable sharing property). Typical proofs of the variable sharing property rely on ad hoc, if clever, matrices. However, in this note, I exploit the properties of rather more intuitive arithmetical structures to establish the variable sharing property for the systems discussed.

THE PERIPATETIC PROGRAM IN CATEGORICAL LOGIC: LEIBNIZ ON PROPOSITIONAL TERMS

Greek antiquity saw the development of two distinct systems of logic: Aristotle’s theory of the categorical syllogism and the Stoic theory of the hypothetical syllogism. Some ancient logicians argued that hypothetical syllogistic is more fundamental than categorical syllogistic on the grounds that the latter relies on modes of propositional reasoning such asreductio ad absurdum. Peripatetic logicians, by contrast, sought to establish the priority of categorical over hypothetical syllogistic by reducing various modes of propositional reasoning to categorical form. In the 17th century, this Peripatetic program of reducing hypothetical to categorical logic was championed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In an essay titledSpecimina calculi rationalis, Leibniz develops a theory of propositional terms that allows him to derive the rule ofreductio ad absurdumin a purely categorical calculus in which every proposition is of the formA is B. We reconstruct Leibniz’s categorical calculus and show that it is strong enough to establish not only the rule ofreductio ad absurdum, but all the laws of classical propositional logic. Moreover, we show that the propositional logic generated by the nonmonotonic variant of Leibniz’s categorical calculus is a natural system of relevance logic known as RMI$_{{}_ \to ^\neg }$.

Relevance logic and entailment

‘Relevance logic’ came into being in the late 1950s, inspired by Wilhelm Ackermann, who rejected certain formulas of the form A→B on the grounds that ‘the truth of A has nothing to do with the question whether there is a logical connection between B and A’. The central idea of relevance logic is to give an account of logical consequence, or entailment, for which a connection of relevance between premises and conclusion is a necessary condition. In both classical and intuitionistic logic, this condition is missing, as is highlighted by the validity in those logics of the ‘spread law’, A &∼A→B; a contradiction ‘spreads’ to every proposition, and simple inconsistency is equivalent to absolute inconsistency. In relevance logic the spread law fails, and the simple inconsistency of a theory (that a set of formulas entails a contradiction) is distinguished from absolute inconsistency (or triviality: that a set of formulas entails every proposition). The programme of relevance logic is to characterize a logic, or a range of logics, satisfying the relevance condition, and to study theories based on such logics, such as relevant arithmetic and relevant set theory.

Relevance in Structured Argumentation

We study properties related to relevance in non-monotonic consequence relations obtained by systems of structured argumentation. Relevance desiderata concern the robustness of a consequence relation under the addition of irrelevant information. For an account of what (ir)relevance amounts to we use syntactic and semantic considerations. Syntactic criteria have been proposed in the domain of relevance logic and were recently used in argumentation theory under the names of non-interference and crash-resistance. The basic idea is that the conclusions of a given argumentative theory should be robust under adding information that shares no propositional variables with the original database. Some semantic relevance criteria are known from non-monotonic logic. For instance, cautious monotony states that if we obtain certain conclusions from an argumentation theory, we may expect to still obtain the same conclusions if we add some of them to the given database. In this paper we investigate properties of structured argumentation systems that warrant relevance desiderata.