Lloyd Humberstone

The revival of rejective negation

Whether assent (“acceptance”) and dissent (“rejection”) are thought of as speech acts or as propositional attitudes, the leading idea of rejectivism is that a grasp of the distinction between them is prior to our understanding of negation as a sentence operator, this operator then being explicable as applying to A to yield something assent to which is tantamount to dissent from A. Widely thought to have been refuted by an argument of Freges, rejectivism has undergone something of a revival in recent years, especially in writings by Huw Price and Timothy Smiley. While agreeing that Freges argument does not refute the position, we shall air some philosophical qualms about it in Section 5, after a thorough examination of the formal issues in Sections 1–4. This discussion draws on – and seeks to draw attention to – some pertinent work of Kent Bendall in the 1970s.

Contra-classical logics

Only propositional logics are at issue here. Such a logic is contra-classical in a superficial sense if it is not a sublogic of classical logic, and in a deeper sense, if there is no way of translating its connectives, the result of which translation gives a sublogic of classical logic. After some motivating examples, we investigate the incidence of contra-classicality (in the deeper sense) in various logical frameworks. In Sections 3 and 4 we will encounter, originally as an example of what (in Section 2) we call a contra-classical modal logic, an unusual logic boasting a connective (“demi-negation”) whose double application is equivalent to a single application of the negation connective. Pondering the example points the way to a general characterization of contra-classicality (Theorems 3.3 and 4.6). In an Appendix (Section 5), we look at one alternative to classical logic as the target for such translational assimilation, intuitionistic logic, calling logics which resist the assimilation, in this case, contraintuitionistic. We will show that one such logic is classical logic itself, thereby strengthening a result of Wojcicki’s to the effect that the consequence relation of classical logic cannot be faithfully embedded by any connective-by-connective translation into that of intuitionistic logic. (What the “faithfully” means here is that not only is the translation of anything provable in the ‘source’ logic provable in the ‘target’ logic, but that also anything whose translation is provable in the target logic is provable in the source logic.)

The Pleasures of Anticipation: Enriching Intuitionistic Logic

We explore a relation we call ‘anticipation’ between formulas, where AanticipatesB (according to some logic) just in case B is a consequence (according to that logic, presumed to support some distinguished implicational connective →) of the formula A→B. We are especially interested in the case in which the logic is intuitionistic (propositional) logic and are much concerned with an extension of that logic with a new connective, written as “a”, governed by rules which guarantee that for any formula B, aB is the (logically) strongest formula anticipating B. The investigation of this new logic, which we call ILa, will confront us on several occasions with some of the finer points in the theory of rules and with issues in the philosophy of logic arising from the proposed explication of the existence of a connective (with prescribed logical behaviour) in terms of the conservative extension of a favoured logic by the addition of such a connective. Other points of interest include the provision of a Kripke semantics with respect to which ILa is demonstrably sound, deployed to establish certain unprovability results as well as to forge connections with C. Rauszers logic of dual intuitionistic negation and dual intuitionistic implication, and the isolation of two relations (between formulas), head-implication and head-linkage, which, though trivial in the setting of classical logic, are of considerable significance in the intuitionistic context.

An Intriguing Logic with Two Implicational Connectives

Matthew Spinks (35) introduces implicative BCSK-algebras, expanding implicative BCK-algebras with an additional binary operation. Subdirectly irreducible implicative BCSK-algebras can be viewed as flat posets with two operations coinciding only in the 1- and 2-element cases, each, in the latter case, giving the two-valued implication truth-function. We introduce the resulting logic (for the general case) in terms of matrix methodology in §1, showing how to reformulate the matrix semantics as a Kripke-style possible worlds semantics, thereby displaying the distinction between the two implications in the more familiar language of modal logic. In §§2 and 3 we study, from this perspective, the fragments obtained by taking the two implications separately, and - after a digression (in §4) on the intuitionistic analogue of the material in §3 - consider them together in §5, closing with a discussion in §6 of issues in the theory of logical rules. Some material is treated in three appendices to prevent §§1-6 from becoming overly distended.

Variations on a Theme of Curry

After an introduction to set the stage (§1), we consider some variations on the reasoning behind Curry’s Paradox arising against the background of classical propositional logic (§2) and of BCI logic and one of its extensions (§3), in the latter case treating the “paradoxicality” as a matter of nonconservative extension rather than outright inconsistency. A question about the relation of this extension and a differently described (though possibly identical) logic intermediate between BCI and BCK is raised in a final section (§4), which closes with a handful of questions left unanswered by our discussion.

Inverses for Normal Modal Operators

Given a 1-ary sentence operator ○, we describe L - another 1-ary operator - as as a left inverse of ○ in a given logic if in that logic every formula ϕ is provably equivalent to L○ϕ. Similarly R is a right inverse of ○ if ϕ is always provably equivalent to ○Rϕ. We investigate the behaviour of left and right inverses for ○ taken as the □ operator of various normal modal logics, paying particular attention to the conditions under which these logics are conservatively extended by the addition of such inverses, as well as to the question of when, in such extensions, the inverses behave as normal modal operators in their own right.

Investigations into a left-structural right-substructural sequent calculus

We study a multiple-succedent sequent calculus with both of the structural rules Left Weakening and Left Contraction but neither of their counterparts on the right, for possible application to the treatment of multiplicative disjunction (fission, ‘cotensor’, par) against the background of intuitionistic logic. We find that, as Hirokawa dramatically showed in a 1996 paper with respect to the rules for implication, the rules for this connective render derivable some new structural rules, even though, unlike the rules for implication, these rules are what we call ipsilateral: applying such a rule does not make any (sub)formula change sides—from the left to the right of the sequent separator or vice versa. Some possibilities for a semantic characterization of the resulting logic are also explored. The paper concludes with three open questions.

Modal Logic for Other-World Agnostics: Neutrality and Halldén Incompleteness

The logic of ‘elsewhere,’ i.e., of a sentence operator interpretable as attaching to a formula to yield a formula true at a point in a Kripke model just in case the first formula is true at all other points in the model, has been applied in settings in which the points in question represent spatial positions (explaining the use of the word ‘elsewhere’), as well as in the case in which they represent moments of time. This logic is applied here to the alethic modal case, in which the points are thought of as possible worlds, with the suggestion that its deployment clarifies aspects of a position explored by John Divers un-der the name ‘modal agnosticism.’ In particular, it makes available a logic whose Halldén incompleteness explicitly registers the agnostic element of the position – its neutrality as between modal realism and modal anti-realism.

Valuational semantics of rule derivability

If a certain semantic relation (which we call ‘local consequence’) is allowed to guide expectations about which rules are derivable from other rules, these expectations will not always be fulfilled, as we illustrate. An alternative semantic criterion (based on a relation we call ‘global consequence’), suggested by work of J.W. Garson, turns out to provide a much better — indeed a perfectly accurate — guide to derivability.

Similarity Relations and the Preservation of Solidity

The partitions of a given set stand in a well known one-to-onecorrespondence with the equivalence relations on that set. We askwhether anything analogous to partitions can be found which correspondin a like manner to the similarity relations (reflexive, symmetricrelations) on a set, and show that (what we call) decompositions – of acertain kind – play this role. A key ingredient in the discussion is akind of closure relation (analogous to the consequence relationsconsidered in formal logic) having nothing especially to do with thesimilarity issue, and we devote a final section to highlighting some ofits properties.