Pandora: A Reasoning Toolbox using Natural Deduction Style

Pandora is a tool for supporting the learning of first ordernatural deduction. It includes a help window, an interactivecontext sensitive tutorial known as the "e-tutor" and facilitiesto save, reload and export to LATEX. Every attempt to applya natural deduction rule is met with either success or a helpfulerror message, providing the student with instant feedback.Detailed electronic logs of student usage are recorded for evaluationpurposes. This paper describes the basic functionality, thee-tutor, our experiences of using the tool in teaching and ourfuture plans.     

First-order Expressivity for S5-models: Modal vs. Two-sorted Languages

Standard models for model predicate logic consist of a Kripke frame whose worlds come equipped with relational structures. Both modal and two-sorted predicate logic are natural languages for speaking about such models. In this paper we compare their expressivity. We determine a fragment of the two-sorted language for which the modal language is expressively complete on S5-models. Decidable criteria for modal definability are presented.     

Term-Modal Logics

Many powerful logics exist today for reasoning about multi-agent systems, but in most of these it is hard to reason about an infinite or indeterminate number of agents. Also the naming schemes used in the logics often lack expressiveness to name agents in an intuitive way.To obtain a more expressive language for multi-agent reasoning and a better naming scheme for agents, we introduce a family of logics called term-modal logics. A main feature of our logics is the use of modal operators indexed by the terms of the logics. Thus, one can quantify over variables occurring in modal operators. In term-modal logics agents can be represented by terms, and knowledge of agents is expressed with formulas within the scope of modal operators.This gives us a flexible and uniform language for reasoning about the agents themselves and their knowledge. This article gives examples of the expressiveness of the languages and provides sequent-style and tableau-based proof systems for the logics. Furthermore we give proofs of soundness and completeness with respect to the possible world semantics.     

Searching for the Roots of the Circumstantial Ad Hominem

This paper looks into the known evidence on the origins of the type of argument called the circumstantial ad hominemargument in modern logic textbooks, and introduces some new evidence. This new evidence comes primarily from recent historical work by Jaap Mansfeld and Jonathan Barnes citing many cases where philosophers in the ancient world were attacked on the grounds that their personal actions failed to be consistent with their philosophical teachings. On the total body of evidence, two hypotheses about the roots of the circumstantial ad hominem are considered. One is that it came from Aristotle through Locke. The other is that it may have had separate roots in these ancient philosophical writings that criticized philosophers for not practicing what they preached.     

On Kripke’s Dogmatism Paradox: A Logical Dynamical Analysis

As a byproduct of solving the surprise-exam paradox, Saul Kripke formulates a “dogmatism paradox” which seems to show that knowledge entails dogmatism. In this paper, the author analyzes the nature of the dogmatism paradox from a logical dynamical perspective. The author suggests that the dogmatism paradox is better understood as a paradox of knowledge attribution rather than of knowledge. Therefore, the dogmatism paradox could be solved without sacrificing the principle of epistemic closure. Based on a famous version of relevant alternatives theory, the author formalizes a logic of knowledge attribution in the style of logical dynamics, namely, public retraction logic, and analyzes how knowledge attributions are retracted with the expansion of relevant alternatives.     

回到思想史:先秦名学研究的新路向

Discussions of name (ming, 名) during the pre-Qin and Qin-Han period of Chinese history were very active. The concept ming at that time can be divided into two categories, one is the ethical-political meaning of the term and the other is the linguistic-logical understanding. The former far exceeds the latter in terms of overall influence on the development of Chinese intellectual history. But it is the latter that has received the most attention in the 20th century, due to the influence of Western logic. This has led to the result of a bias in the contemporary studies of ming. Changing course by returning to the correct path of intellectual history can providing an objective and thorough ordering of the pre-Qin discourse on ming. Translated by Joseph E. Harroff from Shandong Daxue Xuebao 山东大学学报 (Journal of Shandong University), 2007, (2): 59–64     

Using Syllogistics to Teach Metalogic

This article describes a specific pedagogical context for an advanced logic course and presents a strategy that might facilitate students’ transition from the object‐theoretical to the metatheoretical perspective on logic. The pedagogical context consists of philosophy students who in general have had little training in logic, except for a thorough introduction to syllogistics. The teaching strategy tries to exploit this knowledge of syllogistics, by emphasizing the analogies between ideas from metalogic and ideas from syllogistics, such as existential import, the distinction between contradictories and contraries, and the square of opposition. This strategy helps to improve students’ understanding of metalogic, because it allows the students to integrate these new ideas with their previously acquired knowledge of syllogistics.     

Fragments of R-Mingle

The logic RM and its basic fragments (always with implication) are considered here as entire consequence relations, rather than as sets of theorems. A new observation made here is that the disjunction of RM is definable in terms of its other positive propositional connectives, unlike that of R. The basic fragments of RM therefore fall naturally into two classes, according to whether disjunction is or is not definable. In the equivalent quasivariety semantics of these fragments, which consist of subreducts of Sugihara algebras, this corresponds to a distinction between strong and weak congruence properties. The distinction is explored here. A result of Avron is used to provide a local deduction-detachment theorem for the fragments without disjunction. Together with results of Sobociski, Parks and Meyer (which concern theorems only), this leads to axiomatizations of these entire fragments — not merely their theorems. These axiomatizations then form the basis of a proof that all of the basic fragments of RM with implication are finitely axiomatized consequence relations.Special issue of Studia Logica: Algebraic Theory of Quasivarieties Presented by M. E. Adams, K. V. Adaricheva, W. Dziobiak, and A. V. Kravchenko