Relevance logic

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Relevance logic, also called relevant logic, is any of a family of non-classical substructural logics that impose certain restrictions on implication. (It is generally, but not universally, called relevant logic by Australian logicians, and relevance logic by other English-speaking logicians).

Relevance logic was proposed in 1928 by Soviet (Russian) philosopher Ivan E. Orlov (1886 - circa 1936) in his strictly mathematical paper "The Logic of Compatibility of Propositions" published in Matematicheskii Sbornik.

Relevance logic aims to capture aspects of implication that are ignored by the "material implication" operator in classical truth-functional logic. This idea is not new: C. I. Lewis was led to invent modal logic, and specifically strict implication, on the grounds that classical logic holds, for example, that a falsehood implies any proposition. Hence "if I am the pope, then 2+2=5" is true. But clearly even if one were the pope, 2+2 would still not be 5 (see counterfactuals). Hence the implication relation ought to be necessary.

Other problems remain even after we eliminate the paradoxes of material implication. Anderson and Belnap (see below) enumerate several "paradoxes of strict implication": for example, a contradiction still implies everything, and everything implies a tautology. The counter-intuition is that implication —as we use that term— requires that there be some kind of connection in subject matter between premises and conclusion.

The difference between classical and relevance logic is that in the latter the semantics requires that the antecedent and consequent of an implication be relevantly related. In terms of a syntactical constraint for a propositional calculus, it is necessary, but not sufficient, that premises and conclusion share atomic formulae. In a predicate calculus, relevance requires sharing of variables and constants between premises and conclusion. This can be ensured (along with stronger conditions) by, e.g., placing certain restrictions on the rules of a natural deduction system.

In particular, a Fitch-style natural deduction can be adapted to accommodate relevance by introducing tags at the end of each line of a derivation indicating the "relevant" premises. Gentzen-style calculi can be modified by removing the weakening rules that allow for the introduction of arbitrary formulae on the right or left side of the sequents.

The basic idea of relevant implication appears in medieval logic, and some pioneering work was done by Ackermann, Moh, and Church in the 1950s. Drawing on them, Nuel Belnap and Alan Ross Anderson (with others) wrote the magnum opus of the subject, "Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity" in the 1970s. They focused on both systems of entailment and systems of relevance, where the former is supposed to be both relevant and necessary.

A notable feature of relevance logics is that they are paraconsistent logics: the existence of a contradiction will not cause explosion. This follows from the fact that a conditional with a contradictory antecedent that shares no propositional or predicate letters with the consequent cannot be true.

[edit] References

• Alan Ross Anderson and Nuel Belnap, 1975. Entailment:the logic of relevance and necessity, vol. I. Princeton University Press.
• ------- and J. M. Dunn, 1992. Entailment: the logic of relevance and necessity, vol. II, Princeton University Press.
• Mares, Edwin, and Meyer, R. K., 2001, "Relevant Logics," in Goble, Lou, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic. Blackwell.

[edit] External links

• Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: "Relevance logic" -- by Edwin Mares.