Conditionals and inferential connections: toward a new semantics*

Abstract

In previous published research (“Conditionals and Inferential Connections: A Hypothetical Inferential Theory,” Cognitive Psychology, 2018), we investigated experimentally what role the presence and strength of an inferential connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent plays in how people process that conditional. Our analysis showed the strength of that connection to be strongly predictive of whether participants evaluated the conditional as true, false, or neither true nor false. In this article, we re-analyse the data from our previous research, now focussing on the semantics of conditionals rather than on how they are processed. Specifically, we use those data to compare the main extant semantics with each other and with inferentialism, a semantics according to which the truth of a conditional requires the presence of an inferential connection between the conditional’s component parts.     

Interpretations of intuitionist logic in non-normal modal logics

Historically, it was the interpretations of intuitionist logic in the modal logic S4 that inspired the standard Kripke semantics for intuitionist logic. The inspiration of this paper is the interpretation of intuitionist logic in the non-normal modal logic S3: an S3 model structure can be 'looked at' as an intuitionist model structure and the semantics for S3 can be 'cashed in' to obtain a non-normal semantics for intuitionist propositional logic. This non-normal semantics is then extended to intuitionist quantificational logic.     

Combining classical logic, paraconsistency and relevance

We present a logic with has both a simple semantics and a cut-free Gentzen-type system on one hand, and which combines relevance logics, da Costa's paraconsistent logics, and classical logic on the other. We further show that the logic has many other nice properties, and that its language is ideal from the semantic point of view.     

Mathematical modal logic: A view of its evolution

This is a survey of the origins of mathematical interpretations of modal logics, and their development over the last century or so. It focuses on the interconnections between algebraic semantics using Boolean algebras with operators and relational semantics using structures often called Kripke models. It reviews the ideas of a number of people who independently contributed to the emergence of relational semantics, and compares them with the work of Kripke. It concludes with an account of several applications of modal model theory to mathematics and theoretical computer science.     

Fresh Logic: proof-theory and semantics for FM and nominal techniques

In this paper we introduce Fresh Logic, a natural deduction style first-order logic extended with term-formers and quantifiers derived from the FM-sets model of names and binding in abstract syntax. Fresh Logic can be classical or intuitionistic depending on whether we include a law of excluded middle; we present a proof-normalisation procedure for the intuitionistic case and a semantics based on Kripke models in FM-sets for which it is sound and complete.     

Doing well enough: Toward a logic for common-sense morality

On the traditional deontic framework, what is required (what morality demands) and what is optimal (what morality recommends) can't be distinguished and hence they can't both be represented. Although the morally optional can be represented, the supererogatory (exceeding morality's demands), one of its proper subclasses, cannot be. The morally indifferent, another proper subclass of the optional-one obviously disjoint from the supererogatory-is also not representable. Ditto for the permissibly suboptimal and the morally significant. Finally, the minimum that morality allows finds no place in the traditional scheme. With a focus on the question, “What would constitute a hospitable logical neighborhood for the concept of supererogation?”, I present and motivate an enriched logical and semantic framework for representing all these concepts of common sense morality.     

Natural language semantics in biproduct dagger categories

Biproduct dagger categories serve as models for natural language. In particular, the biproduct dagger category of finite dimensional vector spaces over the field of real numbers accommodates both the extensional models of predicate calculus and the intensional models of quantum logic. The morphisms representing the extensional meanings of a grammatical string are translated to morphisms representing the intensional meanings such that truth is preserved. Pregroup grammars serve as the tool that transforms a grammatical string into a morphism. The chosen linguistic examples concern negation, relative noun phrases, comprehension and quantifiers.     

Making semantics for essence

In this paper, I develop a truthmaker semantics for essence and use the semantics to investigate the explanatory role of essence.     

Many Concepts and Two Logics of Algorithmic Reduction

Within the program of finding axiomatizations for various parts of computability logic, it was proven earlier that the logic of interactive Turing reduction is exactly the implicative fragment of Heyting’s intuitionistic calculus. That sort of reduction permits unlimited reusage of the computational resource represented by the antecedent. An at least equally basic and natural sort of algorithmic reduction, however, is the one that does not allow such reusage. The present article shows that turning the logic of the first sort of reduction into the logic of the second sort of reduction takes nothing more than just deleting the contraction rule from its Gentzen-style axiomatization. The first (Turing) sort of interactive reduction is also shown to come in three natural versions. While those three versions are very different from each other, their logical behaviors (in isolation) turn out to be indistinguishable, with that common behavior being precisely captured by implicative intuitionistic logic. Among the other contributions of the present article is an informal introduction of a series of new — finite and bounded — versions of recurrence operations and the associated reduction operations. Presented by Robert Goldblatt     

An argument game for stable semantics

In this paper, we present a discussion game for argumentationunder stable semantics. Our work is inspired by Vreeswijk andPrakken, who have defined a similar game for preferred semantics.In the current paper, we restate Vreeswijk and Prakken's workusing the approach of argument labellings and then show howit can be adjusted for stable semantics. The nature of the resultingargument game is somewhat unusual, since stable semantics doesnot satisfy the property of relevance.     

A multiple-valued logic approach to the design and verification of hardware circuits

We present a novel approach, which is based on multiple-valued logic (MVL), to the verification and analysis of digital hardware designs, which extends the common ternary or quaternary approaches for simulations. The simulations which are performed in the more informative MVL setting reveal details which are either invisible or harder to detect through binary or ternary simulations. In equivalence verification, detecting different behavior under MVL simulations may lead to the discovery of a genuine binary non-equivalence or to a qualitative gap between two designs. The value of a variable in a simulation may hold information about its degree of truth and its “place of birth” and “date of birth”. Applications include equivalence verification, initialization, assertions generation and verification, partial control on the flow of data by prioritizing and block-oriented simulations. Much of the paper is devoted to theoretical aspects behind the MVL approach, including the reason for choosing a specific algebra for computations and the introduction of the notions of De Morgan Canonical Form and of verification complexity of Boolean expressions. Two basic simulation-based algorithms are presented, one for satisfying and verifying combinational designs and the other for equivalence verification of sequential designs.