In spite of a powerful tradition, more than two thousand years old, that in a valid argument the premises must be relevant to the conclusion, twentieth-century logicians neglected the concept of relevance until the publication of Volume I of this monumental work. Since that time relevance logic has achieved an important place in the field of philosophy: Volume II of Entailment brings to a conclusion a powerful and authoritative presentation of the subject by most of the top people working in (...) the area. Originally the aim of Volume II was simply to cover certain topics not treated in the first volume--quantification, for example--or to extend the coverage of certain topics, such as semantics. However, because of the technical progress that has occurred since the publication of the first volume, Volume II now includes other material. The book contains the work of Alasdair Urquhart, who has shown that the principal sentential systems of relevance logic are undecidable, and of Kit Fine, who has demonstrated that, although the first-order systems are incomplete with respect to the conjectured constant domain semantics, they are still complete with respect to a semantics based on "arbitrary objects." Also presented is important work by the other contributing authors, who are Daniel Cohen, Steven Giambrone, Dorothy L. Grover, Anil Gupta, Glen Helman, Errol P. Martin, Michael A. McRobbie, and Stuart Shapiro. Robert G. Wolf's bibliography of 3000 items is a valuable addition to the volume. (shrink)

The purpose of this work is to present Gentzen-style formulations of S5 and S4 based on sequents of higher levels. Sequents of level 1 are like ordinary sequents, sequents of level 1 have collections of sequents of level 1 on the left and right of the turnstile, etc. Rules for modal constants involve sequents of level 2, whereas rules for customary logical constants of first-order logic with identity involve only sequents of level 1. A restriction on Thinning on the right (...) of level 2, which when applied to Thinning on the right of level 1 produces intuitionistic out of classical logic (without changing anything else), produces S4 out of S5 (without changing anything else). This characterization of modal constants with sequents of level 2 is unique in the following sense. If constants which differ only graphically are given a formally identical characterization, they can be shown inter-replaceable (not only uniformly) with the original constants salva provability. Customary characterizations of modal constants with sequents of level 1, as well as characterizations in Hilbert-style axiomatizations, are not unique in this sense. This parallels the case with implication, which is not uniquely characterized in Hilbert-style axiomatizations, but can be uniquely characterized with sequents of level 1. These results bear upon theories of philosophical logic which attempt to characterize logical constants syntactically. They also provide an illustration of how alternative logics differ only in their structural rules, whereas their rules for logical constants are identical. (shrink)

Gupta’s Rule of Revision theory of truth builds on insights to be found in Martin and Woodruff and Kripke in order to permanently deepen our understanding of truth, of paradox, and of how we work our language while our language is working us. His concept of a predicate deriving its meaning by way of a Rule of Revision ought to impact significantly on the philosophy of language. Still, fortunately, he has left me something to.

This book was designed primarily as a textbook; though the author hopes that it will prove to be of interests to others beside logic students. Part I of this book covers the fundamentals of the subject the propositional calculus and the theory of quantification. Part II deals with the traditional formal logic and with the developments which have taken that as their starting-point. Part III deals with modal, three-valued, and extensional systems.