ABSTRACTDo truth tables—the ordinary sort that we use in teaching and explaining basic propositional logic—require an assumption of consistency for their construction? In this essay we show that truth tables can be built in a consistency-independent paraconsistent setting, without any appeal to classical logic. This is evidence for a more general claim—that when we write down the orthodox semantic clauses for a logic, whatever logic we presuppose in the background will be the logic that appears in the foreground. Rather than (...) any one logic being privileged, then, on this count partisans across the logical spectrum are in relatively similar dialectical positions. (shrink)

Satisfiability or Sat\ is the metatheoretic statementEvery formally intuitionistically consistent set of first-order sentences has a model.The models in question are the Tarskian relational structures familiar from standard first-order model theory, but here treated within intuitionistic metamathematics. We prove that both IZF, intuitionistic Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, and HAS, second-order Heyting arithmetic, prove Sat\ to be false outright. Following the lead of Carter :75–95, 2008), we then generalize this result to some provably intermediate first-order logics, including the Rose logic. These metatheorems (...) distinguish the intuitionistic foundational significance of Sat\ sharply from that of Sat\, the satisfiability claim for intuitionistic propositional logic. At the same time, they establish intuitionistic connections with and between Test, COMP\, and \. Here, Test is the scheme of Testability, and COMP\ and \ are completeness for intuitionistic propositional logic and predicate logic, respectively. (shrink)

Special issue: "Reflecting on the Legacy of C.I. Lewis: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Modal Logic".

We introduce a general notion of semantic structure for first-order theories, covering a variety of constructions such as Tarski and Kripke semantics, and prove that, over Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, the completeness of such semantics is equivalent to the Boolean prime ideal theorem. Using a result of McCarty, we conclude that the completeness of Kripke semantics is equivalent, over intuitionistic Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, to the Law of Excluded Middle plus BPI. Along the way, we also prove the equivalence, over ZF, between (...) BPI and the completeness theorem for Kripke semantics for both first-order and propositional theories. (shrink)

The present discussion takes up an issue raised in Section 5 of Ross Brady and Penelope Rush’s paper ‘Four Basic Logical Issues’ concerning the (claimed) triviality – in the sense of automatic availability – of soundness and completeness results for a logic in a metalanguage employing at least as much logical vocabulary as the object logic, where the metalogical behaviour of the common logical vocabulary is as in the object logic. We shall see – in Propositions 4.5–4.7 – that this (...) triviality claim faces difficulties in the face of Halldén incompleteness, for essentially the same reasons that Halldén thought this phenomenon raised seman- tic difficulties for the modal logics of C. I. Lewis exhibiting it. To counter any inclination to dismiss the phenomenon as providing at best a marginal range of counterexamples to the triviality claim, a Postscript assembles some reminders of the extent of – and the varied considerations favouring – Halldén incompleteness. (shrink)

How many correct logics are there? Monists endorse that there is one, pluralists argue for many, and nihilists claim that there are none. Reasoning about these views requires a logic. That is the meta-logic. It turns out that there are some meta-logical challenges specifically for the pluralists. I will argue that these depend on an implicitly assumed absoluteness of correct logic. Pluralists can solve the challenges by giving up on this absoluteness and instead adopt contextualism about correct logic. This contextualism (...) is naturalistically appealing. (shrink)