In this article, we consider variations of Nuel Belnap’s ‘artificial reasoner’. In particular, we examine cases in which the artificial reasoner is faulty, e.g. situations in which the reasoner is unable to calculate the value of a formula due to an inability to retrieve the values of its atoms. In the first half of the article, we consider two ways of modelling such circumstances and prove the deductive systems arising from these two types of models to be equivalent to Graham (...) Priest’s first-degree entailment with an ‘emptiness’ value and Richard Angell’s analytic containment, making computational interpretations of these systems possible. The Belnap-type semantics for AC bring FDE φ and AC in line with other containment logics in their neighborhood. The second half of the article examines formal questions, such as whether AC admits an analysis along the lines of that given to the related system of William Parry’s system of analytic implication, as suggested by Kurt Gödel and confirmed by Kit Fine. Furthermore, a natural means of extending these systems to languages with an intensional implication connective is investigated. (shrink)

In early Buddhist logic, it was standard to assume that for any state of a ff airs there were four possibilities: that it held, that it did not, both, or neither. This is the catuskoti (or tetralemma). Classical logicians have had a hard time mak­ing sense of this, but it makes perfectly good sense in the se­mantics of various paraconsistent logics, such as First Degree Entailment. Matters are more complicated for later Buddhist thinkers, such as Nagarjuna, who appear to suggest (...) that none of these options , or more than one, may hold. The point of this paper is to examine the matter, including the formal logical machinery that may be appropriate. (shrink)

This paper extends Fitting's epistemic interpretation of some Kleene logics, to also account for Paraconsistent Weak Kleene logic. To achieve this goal, a dualization of Fitting's "cut-down" operator is discussed, rendering a "track-down" operator later used to represent the idea that no consistent opinion can arise from a set including an inconsistent opinion. It is shown that, if some reasonable assumptions are made, the truth-functions of Paraconsistent Weak Kleene coincide with certain operations defined in this track-down fashion. Finally, further reflections (...) on conjunction and disjunction in the weak Kleene logics accompany this paper, particularly concerning their relation with containment logics. These considerations motivate a special approach to defining sound and complete Gentzen-style sequent calculi for some of their four-valued generalizations. (shrink)

One approach to the paradoxes of self-referential languages is to allow some sentences to lack a truth value (or to have more than one). Then assigning truth values where possible becomes a fixpoint construction and, following Kripke, this is usually carried out over a partially ordered family of three-valued truth-value assignments. Some years ago Matt Ginsberg introduced the notion of bilattice, with applications to artificial intelligence in mind. Bilattices generalize the structure Kripke used in a very natural way, while making (...) the mathematical machinery simpler and more perspicuous. In addition, work such as that of Yablo fits naturally into the bilattice setting. What I do here is present the general background of bilattices, discuss why they are natural, and show how fixpoint approaches to truth in languages that allow self-reference can be applied. This is not new work, but rather is a summary of research I have done over many years. (shrink)

We examine the relationship between the logics of nonsense of Bochvar and Halldén and the containment logics in the neighborhood of William Parry’s A I. We detail two strategies for manufacturing containment logics from nonsense logics—taking either connexive and paraconsistent fragments of such systems—and show how systems determined by these techniques have appeared as Frederick Johnson’s R C and Carlos Oller’s A L. In particular, we prove that Johnson’s system is precisely the intersection of Bochvar’s B 3 and Graham Priest’s (...) non-symmetrized connexive logic and that Oller’s system lies just beneath the intersection of B 3 and Priest’s paraconsistent L P. We conclude by examining Oller’s system in more depth, giving it a characterization in terms of L P and showing that it plays the same role to Harry Deutsch’s paraconsistent containment logic S that Aleksandr Zinov'ev’s S 1 plays with respect to A I. (shrink)

Kleene’s strong three-valued logic extends naturally to a four-valued logic proposed by Belnap. We introduce a guard connective into Belnap’s logic and consider a few of its properties. Then we show that by using it four-valued analogs of Kleene’s weak three-valued logic, and the asymmetric logic of Lisp are also available. We propose an extension of these ideas to the family of distributive bilattices. Finally we show that for bilinear bilattices the extensions do not produce any new equivalences.

The hallmark of the deductive systems known as ‘conceptivist’ or ‘containment’ logics is that for all theorems of the form , all atomic formulae appearing in also appear in . Significantly, as a consequence, the principle of Addition fails. While often billed as a formalisation of Kantian analytic judgements, once semantics were discovered for these systems, the approach was largely discounted as merely the imposition of a syntactic filter on unrelated systems. In this paper, we examine a number of prima (...) facie unrelated deductive contexts in which Addition fails and attempt to harmonise them by developing a computational interpretation of conceptivist logics. (shrink)