After 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)

Accounts 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)

This discussion explores the possibility of distinguishing a tighter notion of contrariety evident in the Square of Opposition, especially in its modal incarnations, than as that binary relation holding statements that cannot both be true, with or without the added rider ‘though can both be false’. More than one theorist has voiced the intuition that the paradigmatic contraries of the traditional Square are related in some such tighter way—involving the specific role played by negation in contrasting them—that distinguishes them from (...) other pairs of incompatible statements constructed from the same conceptual materials. Prominent among examples, these other nonstandard pairs are the ‘new contraries’ presented by Robert Blanché’s hexagon(s) of opposition. With special, though not exclusive, attention to these cases, we investigate whether contrariety in the distinguished sense can be captured by adding to the incompatibility condition the further demand that the pair of statements concerned can be represented as the results of applying some sentence operator to the content in its scope, for one of the pair, and, for the other, the application of that same operator to the negation of that content. For one of the two cases, a Blanché case, of nonstandard contrariety singled out for attention, the question of whether such a representation is available is settled at the end of Section 4, and then in a more satisfying way in Section 5, though for the other case, noticed by Peter Simons, the question remains open, after some tentative discussion in one subsection, 6.2, of an Appendix (Section 6). (shrink)

Inspired by the supervenience-determined consequence relation and the semantics of agreement operator, we introduce a modal logic of supervenience, which has a dyadic operator of supervenience as a sole modality. The semantics of supervenience modality very naturally correspond to the supervenience-determined consequence relation, in a quite similar way that the strict implication corresponds to the inference-determined consequence relation. We show that this new logic is more expressive than the modal logic of agreement, by proposing a notion of bisimulation for the (...) latter. We provide a sound proof system for the new logic. We lift onto more general logics of supervenience. Related to this, we address an interesting open research direction listed in the literature, by comparing propositional logic of determinacy and noncontingency logic in expressive powers and axiomatizing propositional logic of determinacy over various classes of frames. We also obtain an alternative axiomatization for propositional logic of determinacy over universal models. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of authors have started studying Aristotelian diagrams containing metalogical notions, such as tautology, contradiction, satisfiability, contingency, strong and weak interpretations of contrariety, etc. The present paper is a contribution to this line of research, and its main aims are both to extend and to deepen our understanding of metalogical diagrams. As for extensions, we not only study several metalogical decorations of larger and less widely known Aristotelian diagrams, but also consider metalogical decorations of another type (...) of logical diagrams, viz. duality diagrams. At a more fundamental level, we present a unifying perspective which sheds new light on the connections between new and existing metalogical diagrams, as well as between object- and metalogical diagrams. Overall, the paper studies two types of logical diagrams and four kinds of metalogical decorations. (shrink)