The Connectives.Lloyd Humberstone -2011 - MIT Press. Edited by Lloyd Humberstone.detailsIt will be an essential resource for philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, linguists, or any scholar who finds connectives, and the conceptual issues surrounding them, to be a source of interest.This landmark work offers both ...
Philosophical Applications of Modal Logic.Lloyd Humberstone -2016 - College Publications.detailsThis text aims to convey some of the interest and charm of modal logic, and to put a reader new to the subject in a position to have an informed opinion as to its applicability to each of several areas of philosophical concern in which the merits of a modal approach' have been controversial. he main focus, for these purposes, is on normal modal logics, though some attention is given to the non-normal side of the picture.
Two-dimensional adventures.Lloyd Humberstone -2004 -Philosophical Studies 118 (1-2):17--65.detailsThis paper recalls some applications of two-dimensional modal logic from the 1980s, including work on the logic of Actually and on a somewhat idealized version of the indicative/subjunctive distinction, as well as on absolute and relative necessity. There is some discussion of reactions this material has aroused in commentators since. We also survey related work by Leslie Tharp from roughly the same period.
The revival of rejective negation.Lloyd Humberstone -2000 -Journal of Philosophical Logic 29 (4):331-381.detailsWhether 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 Frege's, rejectivism has undergone something of a revival in (...) recent years, especially in writings by Huw Price and Timothy Smiley. While agreeing that Frege's 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. (shrink)
Contra-classical logics.Lloyd Humberstone -2000 -Australasian Journal of Philosophy 78 (4):438 – 474.detailsOnly 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, contra- intuitionistic. 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.. (shrink)
Explicating Logical Independence.Lloyd Humberstone -2020 -Journal of Philosophical Logic 49 (1):135-218.detailsAccounts of logical independence which coincide when applied in the case of classical logic diverge elsewhere, raising the question of what a satisfactory all-purpose account of logical independence might look like. ‘All-purpose’ here means: working satisfactorily as applied across different logics, taken as consequence relations. Principal candidate characterizations of independence relative to a consequence relation are that there the consequence relation concerned is determined by only by classes of valuations providing for all possible truth-value combinations for the formulas whose independence (...) is at issue, and that the consequence relation ‘says’ nothing special about how those formulas are related that it does not say about arbitrary formulas. Each of these proposals returns counterintuitive verdicts in certain cases—the truth-value inspired approach classifying certain cases one would like to describe as involving failures of independence as being cases of independence, and the de Jongh approach counting some intuitively independent pairs of formulas as not being independent after all. In final section, a modification of the latter approach is tentatively sketched to correct for these misclassifications. The attention is on conceptual clarification throughout, rather than the provision of technical results. Proofs, as well as further elaborations, are lodged in the ‘longer notes’ in a final Appendix. (shrink)
Valuational semantics of rule derivability.Lloyd Humberstone -1996 -Journal of Philosophical Logic 25 (5):451 - 461.detailsIf 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.
Contrariety and Subcontrariety: The Anatomy of Negation (with Special Reference to an Example of J.-Y. Béziau).Lloyd Humberstone -2005 -Theoria 71 (3):241-262.detailsWe discuss aspects of the logic of negation bearing on an issue raised by Jean-Yves Béziau, recalled in §1. Contrary- and subcontrary-forming operators are introduced in §2, which examines some of their logical behaviour, leading on naturally to a consideration in §3 of dual intuitionistic negation (as well as implication), and some further operators related to intuitionistic negation. In §4, a historical explanation is suggested as to why some of these negation-related connectives have attracted more attention than others. The remaining (...) sections (§§5, 6) briefly address a question about a certain notion of global contrariety and the provision of Kripke semantics for the various operators in play in our discussion. (shrink)
Supervenience, Dependence, Disjunction.Lloyd Humberstone -2019 -Logic and Logical Philosophy 28 (1):3-135.detailsThis paper explores variations on and connections between the topics mentioned in its title, using as something of an anchor the discussion in Valentin Goranko and Antti Kuusisto’s “Logics for propositional determinacy and independence”, a venture into what the authors call the logic of determinacy, which they contrast with (a demodalized version of) Jouko Väänänen’s modal dependence logic. As they make clear in their discussion, these logics are closely connected with the topics of noncontingency and supervenience. Two opening sections of (...) the present paper address some of these connections, including related earlier logical work by the present author as well as very recent work by Jie Fan. The Väänänen-inspired treatment is presented in a third section, and then, in Sections 4 and 5, as a kind of centerpiece for the discussion, we follow Goranko and Kuusisto in elaborating one principal reason offered for preferring their own approach over that treatment, which concerns some anomalies over the behaviour of disjunction in the latter treatment. Sections 6 and 7 look at dependence and (several different versions of) disjunction in inquisitive logic, especially as presented by Ivano Ciardelli. Section 8 revisits the less formal property-supervenience literature with issues from the first two sections of the paper in mind, and we conclude with a Postscript addressing a further conceptual issue pertaining to the relation between modal and quantificational dependence logics. (shrink)
Parts and Partitions.Lloyd Humberstone -2000 -Theoria 66 (1):41-82.detailsOur object is to study the interaction between mereology and David Lewis’ theory of subject-matters, elaborating his observation that not every subject matter is of the form: how things stand with such-and-such a part of the world. After an informal introduction to this point in Section 1, we turn to a formal treatment of the partial orderings arising in the two areas – the part-whole relation, on the one hand, and the relation of refinement amongst partitions of the set of (...) worlds, on the other. We emphasize a certain duality, formulated in and in Section 2, between the corresponding lattice operations – mereological joins with partition-lattice meets, mereological meets with partition-lattice joins. Section 3 presents some issues that are raised by consideration of the informally familiar idea of logical subtraction. These include, in particular, a problem about the need for a notion of independence different from the usual logical notion going by that name. The apparatus of Section 2 promises to throw some light on this problem, as we indicate in Section 4. Section 5 ties up some loose ends and suggests an area in which further work would be desirable. (shrink)
Truth‐value relations and logical relations.Lloyd Humberstone -2023 -Theoria 89 (1):124-147.detailsAfter some generalities about connections between functions and relations in Sections 1 and 2 recalls the possibility of taking the semantic values of ‐ary Boolean connectives as ‐ary relations among truth‐values rather than as ‐ary truth functions. Section 3, the bulk of the paper, looks at correlates of these truth‐value relations as applied to formulas, and explores in a preliminary way how their properties are related to the properties of “logical relations” among formulas such as equivalence, implication (entailment) and contrariety (...) (logical incompatibility), concentrating for illustrative purposes on binary logical relations such as those just listed. To avoid an excess of footnotes, some points have been deferred to an Appendix as “Longer Notes”. (shrink)
The Modal Logic of Agreement and Noncontingency.Lloyd Humberstone -2002 -Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 43 (2):95-127.detailsThe formula A (it is noncontingent whether A) is true at a point in a Kripke model just in case all points accessible to that point agree on the truth-value of A. We can think of -based modal logic as a special case of what we call the general modal logic of agreement, interpreted with the aid of models supporting a ternary relation, S, say, with OA (which we write instead of A to emphasize the generalization involved) true at a (...) point w just in case for all points x, y, with Swxy, x and y agree on the truth-value of A. The noncontingency interpretation is the special case in which Swxy if and only if Rwx and Rwy, where R is a traditional binary accessibility relation. Another application, related to work of Lewis and von Kutschera, allows us to think of OA as saying that A is entirely about a certain subject matter. (shrink)
Zolin and Pizzi: Defining Necessity from Noncontingency.Lloyd Humberstone -2013 -Erkenntnis 78 (6):1275-1302.detailsThe point of the present paper is to draw attention to some interesting similarities, as well as differences, between the approaches to the logic of noncontingency of Evgeni Zolin and of Claudio Pizzi. Though neither of them refers to the work of the other, each is concerned with the definability of a (normally behaving, though not in general truth-implying) notion of necessity in terms of noncontingency, standard boolean connectives and additional but non-modal expressive resources. The notion of definability involved is (...) different in the two cases (‘external’ for Zolin, ‘internal’ for Pizzi), as are the additional resources: infinitary conjunction in the case of Zolin, and for Pizzi, first, propositional quantification, and then, later, most ingeniously, the use of a propositional constant. As well as surveying and comparing of the work of these authors, the discussion includes some some novelties, such as the confirmation of a conjecture of Zolin’s (Theorem 2.7). (shrink)
Priest on Negation.Lloyd Humberstone -2019 - In Can Başkent & Thomas Macaulay Ferguson,Graham Priest on Dialetheism and Paraconsistency. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag. pp. 285-341.detailsWhat conception of negation a dialetheist might have, in holding that a statement and its negation can both be true, has been the subject to considerable debate. Several of the issues in play in this area—such as the unique characterization of negation, and the interplay between contrariety and subcontrariety—are broached here by considering some positions taken on them by Graham Priest and assorted critics. Some of the more intricate points, as well as detailed discussions of commentators on Priest are handled (...) in explicitly labelled Digressions and in two Appendices. (shrink)
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Power Matrices and Dunn--Belnap Semantics: Reflections on a Remark of Graham Priest.Lloyd Humberstone -2014 -Australasian Journal of Logic 11 (1).detailsThe plurivalent logics considered in Graham Priest's recent paper of that name can be thought of as logics determined by matrices whose underlying algebras are power algebras, where the power algebra of a given algebra has as elements textit{subsets} of the universe of the given algebra, and the power matrix of a given matrix has has the power algebra of the latter's algebra as its underlying algebra, with its designated elements being selected in a natural way on the basis of (...) those of the given matrix. The present discussion stresses the continuity of Priest's work on the question of which matrices determine consequence relations which remain unaffected on passage to the consequence relation determined by the power matrix of the given matrix with the corresponding question in equational logic as to which identities holding in an algebra continue to hold in its power algebra. Both questions are sensitive to a decision as to whether or not to include the empty set as an element of the power algebra, and our main focus will be on the contrast, when it is included, between the power matrix semantics and the four-valued Dunn--Belnap semantics for first-degree entailment a la Anderson and Belnap) in terms of sets of classical values, in which the empty set figures in a somewhat different way, as Priest had remarked his 1984 study, `Hyper-contradictions', in which what we are calling the power matrix construction first appeared. (shrink)
Béziau's Translation Paradox.Lloyd Humberstone -2005 -Theoria 71 (2):138-181.detailsJean-Yves Béziau (‘Classical Negation can be Expressed by One of its Halves’, Logic Journal of the IGPL 7 (1999), 145–151) has given an especially clear example of a phenomenon he considers a sufficiently puzzling to call the ‘paradox of translation’: the existence of pairs of logics, one logic being strictly weaker than another and yet such that the stronger logic can be embedded within it under a faithful translation. We elaborate on Béziau’s example, which concerns classical negation, as well as (...) giving some additional background (especially from intuitionistic logic) to the example. Our interest is more on the logical exploration of the phenomenon Béziau’s case exemplifies than on the question of whether that phenomenon is (even prima facie ) paradoxical, though in Section 5 we do approach the latter question – somewhat obliquely – by considering an analogous phenomenon which it is hard to find puzzling. (shrink)
Logical discrimination (2nd edition).Lloyd Humberstone -2005 - In Jean-Yves Béziau,Logica Universalis: Towards a General Theory of Logic. Boston: Birkhäuser Verlog. pp. 225–246.detailsWe discuss conditions under which the following ‘truism’ does indeed express a truth: the weaker a logic is in terms of what it proves, the stronger it is as a tool for registering distinctions amongst the formulas in its language.
Replacement in Logic.Lloyd Humberstone -2013 -Journal of Philosophical Logic 42 (1):49-89.detailsWe study a range of issues connected with the idea of replacing one formula by another in a fixed context. The replacement core of a consequence relation ⊢ is the relation holding between a set of formulas {A1,..., Am,...} and a formula B when for every context C, we have C,..., C,... ⊢ C. Section 1 looks at some differences between which inferences are lost on passing to the replacement cores of the classical and intuitionistic consequence relations. For example, we (...) find that while the inference from A and B to \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$A \land B$\end{document}, sanctioned by both these initial consequence relations, is retained on passage to the replacement core in the classical case, it is lost in the intuitionistic case. Further discussion of these two logics occupies Sections 3 and 4. Section 2 looks at the m = 1 case, describing A as replaceable by B according to ⊢ when B is a consequence of A by the replacement core of ⊢, and inquiring as to which choices of ⊢ render this induced replaceability relation symmetric. Section 5 investigates further conceptual refinements— such as a contrast between horizontal and vertical replaceability—suggested by some work of R. B. Angell and R. Harrop in the 1950s and 1960s. Appendix 1 examines a related aspect of term-for-term replacement in connection with identity in predicate logic. Appendix 2 is a repository for proofs which would otherwise clutter up Section 3. (shrink)
Similarity relations and the preservation of solidity.A. P. Hazen &Lloyd Humberstone -2004 -Journal of Logic, Language and Information 13 (1):25-46.detailsThe 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. (shrink)
Note on Extending Congruential Modal Logics.Lloyd Humberstone -2016 -Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 57 (1):95-103.detailsIt is observed that a consistent congruential modal logic is not guaranteed to have a consistent extension in which the Box operator becomes a truth-functional connective for one of the four one-place truth functions.
Variations on a Theme of Curry.Lloyd Humberstone -2006 -Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 47 (1):101-131.detailsAfter an introduction to set the stage, we consider some variations on the reasoning behind Curry's Paradox arising against the background of classical propositional logic and of BCI logic and one of its extensions, 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, which closes with (...) a handful of questions left unanswered by our discussion. (shrink)
Aggregation and idempotence.Lloyd Humberstone -2013 -Review of Symbolic Logic 6 (4):680-708.detailsA 1-ary sentential context is aggregative (according to a consequence relation) if the result of putting the conjunction of two formulas into the context is a consequence (by that relation) of the results of putting first the one formula and then the other into that context. All 1-ary contexts are aggregative according to the consequence relation of classical propositional logic (though not, for example, according to the consequence relation of intuitionistic propositional logic), and here we explore the extent of this (...) phenomenon, generalized to having arbitrary connectives playing the role of conjunction; among intermediate logics, LC, shows itself to occupy a crucial position in this regard, and to suggest a characterization, applicable to a broader range of consequence relations, in terms of a variant of the notion of idempotence we shall call componentiality. This is an analogue, for the consequence relations of propositional logic, of the notion of a conservative operation in universal algebra. (shrink)
Inverses for normal modal operators.Lloyd Humberstone &Timothy Williamson -1997 -Studia Logica 59 (1):33-64.detailsGiven 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 is provably equivalent to L. Similarly R is a right inverse of if is always provably equivalent to R. 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. (shrink)
An Intriguing Logic with Two Implicational Connectives.Lloyd Humberstone -2000 -Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 41 (1):1-40.detailsMatthew 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. (shrink)
Partial Confirmation of a Conjecture on the Boxdot Translation in Modal Logic.Rohan French &Lloyd Humberstone -2009 -Australasian Journal of Logic 7:56-61.detailsThe purpose of the present note is to advertise an interesting conjecture concerning a well-known translation in modal logic, by confirming a (highly restricted) special case of the conjecture.
Variation on a Trivialist Argument of Paul Kabay.Lloyd Humberstone -2011 -Journal of Logic, Language and Information 20 (1):115-132.detailsImpossible worlds are regarded with understandable suspicion by most philosophers. Here we are concerned with a modal argument which might seem to show that acknowledging their existence, or more particularly, the existence of some hypothetical (we do not say “possible”) world in which everything was the case, would have drastic effects, forcing us to conclude that everything is indeed the case—and not just in the hypothesized world in question. The argument is inspired by a metaphysical (rather than modal-logical) argument of (...) Paul Kabay’s which would have us accept this unpalatable conclusion, though its details bear a closer resemblance to a line of thought developed by Jc Beall, in response to which Graham Priest has made some philosophical moves which are echoed in our diagnosis of what goes wrong with the present modal argument. Logical points of some interest independent of the main issue arise along the way. (shrink)
What fa says about a.Lloyd Humberstone -2000 -Dialectica 54 (1):3–28.detailsA sentence mentioning an object can be regarded as saying any one of several things about that object, without thereby being ambiguous. Some of the (logical) repercussions of this commonplace observation are recorded, and some critical discussion is provided of views which would appear to go against it.
Modal Logics That Are Both Monotone and Antitone: Makinson’s Extension Results and Affinities between Logics.Lloyd Humberstone &Steven T. Kuhn -2022 -Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 63 (4):515-550.detailsA notable early result of David Makinson establishes that every monotone modal logic can be extended to LI, LV, or LF, and every antitone logic can be extended to LN, LV, or LF, where LI, LN, LV, and LF are logics axiomatized, respectively, by the schemas □α↔α, □α↔¬α, □α↔⊤, and □α↔⊥. We investigate logics that are both monotone and antitone (hereafter amphitone). There are exactly three: LV, LF, and the minimum amphitone logic AM axiomatized by the schema □α→□β. These logics, (...) along with LI, LN, and a wider class of “extensional” logics, bear close affinities to classical propositional logic. Characterizing those affinities reveals differences among several accounts of equivalence between logics. Some results about amphitone logics do not carry over when logics are construed as consequence or generalized (“multiple-conclusion”) consequence relations on languages that may lack some or all of the nonmodal connectives. We close by discussing these divergences and conditions under which our results do carry over. (shrink)
(1 other version)Sufficiency and Excess.Lloyd Humberstone -2006 -Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (1):265-320.detailsThis paper assembles examples and considerations bearing on such questions as the following. Are statements to the effect that someone is too young (for instance) or that someone is old enough always to be understood in terms of someone's being too young or too old for such-and-such-for example, for them to join a particular organization? And when a 'such-and-such' has been specified, is it always at least tacitly modal in force-in the case just given, too young or old enough to (...) be able to join the organization? These questions are explored by means of a critical examination of the (affirmative) answers given to them by Eric Nelson in a 1980 paper on the subject, with part of the intention being to rescue Nelson's thoughtful discussion from the oblivion into which it appears to have fallen, judging by more recent contributions on the subject by semanticists. (shrink)
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Intuitionistic Logic and Elementary Rules.Lloyd Humberstone &David Makinson -2011 -Mind 120 (480):1035-1051.detailsThe interplay of introduction and elimination rules for propositional connectives is often seen as suggesting a distinguished role for intuitionistic logic. We prove three formal results concerning intuitionistic propositional logic that bear on that perspective, and discuss their significance. First, for a range of connectives including both negation and the falsum, there are no classically or intuitionistically correct introduction rules. Second, irrespective of the choice of negation or the falsum as a primitive connective, classical and intuitionistic consequence satisfy exactly the (...) same structural, introduction, and elimination (briefly, elementary) rules. Third, for falsum as primitive only, intuitionistic consequence is the least consequence relation that satisfies all classically correct elementary rules. (shrink)
False though partly true – an experiment in logic.Lloyd Humberstone -2003 -Journal of Philosophical Logic 32 (6):613-665.detailsWe explore in an experimental spirit the prospects for extending classical propositional logic with a new operator P intended to be interpreted when prefixed to a formula as saying that formula in question is at least partly true. The paradigm case of something which is, in the sense envisaged, false though still "partly" true is a conjunction one of whose conjuncts is false while the other is true. Ideally, we should like such a logic to extend classical logic - or (...) any fragment thereof under consideration - conservatively, to be closed under uniform substitution (of arbitrary formulas for sentence letters or propositional variables), and to allow the substitutivity of provably equivalent formulas salva provabilitate. To varying degrees, we experience some difficulties only with this last ('congruentiality') desideratum in the two four-valued logics we end up giving our most extended consideration to. (shrink)
Note on Supervenience and Definability.Lloyd Humberstone -1998 -Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 39 (2):243-252.detailsThe idea of a property's being supervenient on a class of properties is familiar from much philosophical literature. We give this idea a linguistic turn by converting it into the idea of a predicate symbol's being supervenient on a set of predicate symbols relative to a (first order) theory. What this means is that according to the theory, any individuals differing in respect to whether the given predicate applies to them also differ in respect to the application of at least (...) one of the predicates in the set. The latter relationship we show turns out to coincide with something antecedently familiar from work on definability: with what is called the piecewise (or modelwise) definability, in the theory in question, of the given predicate in terms of those in the set. (shrink)
On a conservative extension argument of Dana Scott.Lloyd Humberstone -2011 -Logic Journal of the IGPL 19 (1):241-288.detailsExegesis, analysis and discussion of an argument deployed by Dana Scott in his 1973 paper ‘Background to Formalization’, rovide an ideal setting for getting clear about some subtleties in the apparently simple idea of conservative extension. There, Scott claimed in respect of two fundamental principles concerning implication that any generalized consequence relation respecting these principles is always extended conservatively by some similarly fundamental principles concerning conjunction and disjunction. This claim appears on the face of it to conflict with cases in (...) the literature in which adding principles governing conjunction or disjunction or both provides a non-conservative extension of the logic to which they are added, even if that logic does satisfy the intuitionistic conditions on implication. We explore the extent to which such cases can be transformed into counterexamples to Scott’s claim. Once one part of this claim is suitably disambiguated, we find no conflict after all, though we also find that Scott occasionally understates what the argument he provides in support of this claim actually establishes. The main goal, apart from getting straight about Scott’s argument, is to give an airing to various issues and distinctions in the general area of conservativity of extensions; as a side benefit, some semantic light will be thrown on a fragmentary intermediate logic of R. A. Bull, which A. N. Prior showed to be extended non-conservatively by the addition of conjunction, governed by the usual axioms. We will see exactly why, despite appearances, this is not a counterexample to Scott’s claim. (shrink)
Classically archetypal rules.Tomasz Połacik &Lloyd Humberstone -2018 -Review of Symbolic Logic 11 (2):279-294.detailsA one-premiss rule is said to be archetypal for a consequence relation when not only is the conclusion of any application of the rule a consequence of the premiss, but whenever one formula has another as a consequence, these formulas are respectively equivalent to a premiss and a conclusion of some application of the rule. We are concerned here with the consequence relation of classical propositional logic and with the task of extending the above notion of archetypality to rules with (...) more than one premiss, and providing an informative characterization of the set of rules falling under the more general notion. (shrink)
(1 other version)Identical Twins, Deduction Theorems, and Pattern Functions: Exploring the Implicative BCSK Fragment of S5.Lloyd Humberstone -2006 -Journal of Philosophical Logic 35 (5):435-487.detailsWe recapitulate (Section 1) some basic details of the system of implicative BCSK logic, which has two primitive binary implicational connectives, and which can be viewed as a certain fragment of the modal logic S5. From this modal perspective we review (Section 2) some results according to which the pure sublogic in either of these connectives (i.e., each considered without the other) is an exact replica of the material implication fragment of classical propositional logic. In Sections 3 and 5 we (...) show that for the pure logic of one of these implicational connectives two – in general distinct – consequence relations (global and local) definable in the Kripke semantics for modal logic turn out to coincide, though this is not so for the pure logic of the other connective, and that there is an intimate relation between formulas constructed by means of the former connective and the local consequence relation. (Corollary 5.8. This, as we show in an Appendix, is connected to the fact that the ‘propositional operations’ associated with both of our implicational connectives are close to being what R. Quackenbush has called pattern functions.) Between these discussions Section 4 examines some of the replacement-of-equivalents properties of the two connectives, relative to these consequence relations, and Section 6 closes with some observations about the metaphor of identical twins as applied to such pairs of connectives. (shrink)
Names and Pseudonyms.Lloyd Humberstone -1995 -Philosophy 70 (274):487 - 512.detailsWas there such a person as Lewis Carroll? An affirmative answer is suggested by the thought that Lewis Carroll was Charles Dodgson, and since there was certainly such a person as Charles Dodgson, there was such a person as Lewis Carroll. A negative answer is suggested by the thought that in arguing thus, the two names ‘Lewis Carroll’ and ‘Charles Dodgson’ are being inappropriately treated as though they were completely on a par: a pseudonym is, after all, a false or (...) fictitious name. Perhaps we should say instead that there was really no such person as Lewis Carroll, but that when Charles Dodgson published under that name, he was pretending that there was, and further, pretending that the works in question formed part of the literary output of this pretendedly real individual. Whether or not this is correct for the case of ‘Lewis Carroll’, I will be suggesting that an account of this second style–a fictionalist account, for short–is appropriate for at least a good many pseudonyms. We shall get to reasons why it might nonetheless not be especially appropriate in the present case in due course: one advantage of the ‘Lewis Carroll’/‘Charles Dodgson’ example, such qualms notwithstanding, is that everyone is familiar not only with both names but with which of them is the pseudonym. Another is that, as we shall have occasion to observe below, Dodgson himself had some interesting views on this particular case of pseudonymy. (shrink)
Investigations into a left-structural right-substructural sequent calculus.Lloyd Humberstone -2007 -Journal of Logic, Language and Information 16 (2):141-171.detailsWe 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 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 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. (shrink)