1,341 research outputs found
Higher-Order Contingentism, Part 1: Closure and Generation
This paper is a study of higher-order contingentism – the view, roughly, that it is contingent what properties and propositions there are. We explore the motivations for this view and various ways in which it might be developed, synthesizing and expanding on work by Kit Fine, Robert Stalnaker, and Timothy Williamson. Special attention is paid to the question of whether the view makes sense by its own lights, or whether articulating the view requires drawing distinctions among possibilities that, according to the view itself, do not exist to be drawn. The paper begins with a non-technical exposition of the main ideas and technical results, which can be read on its own. This exposition is followed by a formal investigation of higher-order contingentism, in which the tools of variable-domain intensional model theory are used to articulate various versions of the view, understood as theories formulated in a higher-order modal language. Our overall assessment is mixed: higher-order contingentism can be fleshed out into an elegant systematic theory, but perhaps only at the cost of abandoning some of its original motivations
Agglomerative Algebras
This paper investigates a generalization of Boolean algebras which I call agglomerative algebras. It also outlines two conceptions of propositions according to which they form an agglomerative algebra but not a Boolean algebra with respect to conjunction and negation
Nominal Abstraction
Recursive relational specifications are commonly used to describe the
computational structure of formal systems. Recent research in proof theory has
identified two features that facilitate direct, logic-based reasoning about
such descriptions: the interpretation of atomic judgments through recursive
definitions and an encoding of binding constructs via generic judgments.
However, logics encompassing these two features do not currently allow for the
definition of relations that embody dynamic aspects related to binding, a
capability needed in many reasoning tasks. We propose a new relation between
terms called nominal abstraction as a means for overcoming this deficiency. We
incorporate nominal abstraction into a rich logic also including definitions,
generic quantification, induction, and co-induction that we then prove to be
consistent. We present examples to show that this logic can provide elegant
treatments of binding contexts that appear in many proofs, such as those
establishing properties of typing calculi and of arbitrarily cascading
substitutions that play a role in reducibility arguments.Comment: To appear in the Journal of Information and Computatio
The Structure of First-Order Causality
Game semantics describe the interactive behavior of proofs by interpreting
formulas as games on which proofs induce strategies. Such a semantics is
introduced here for capturing dependencies induced by quantifications in
first-order propositional logic. One of the main difficulties that has to be
faced during the elaboration of this kind of semantics is to characterize
definable strategies, that is strategies which actually behave like a proof.
This is usually done by restricting the model to strategies satisfying subtle
combinatorial conditions, whose preservation under composition is often
difficult to show. Here, we present an original methodology to achieve this
task, which requires to combine advanced tools from game semantics, rewriting
theory and categorical algebra. We introduce a diagrammatic presentation of the
monoidal category of definable strategies of our model, by the means of
generators and relations: those strategies can be generated from a finite set
of atomic strategies and the equality between strategies admits a finite
axiomatization, this equational structure corresponding to a polarized
variation of the notion of bialgebra. This work thus bridges algebra and
denotational semantics in order to reveal the structure of dependencies induced
by first-order quantifiers, and lays the foundations for a mechanized analysis
of causality in programming languages
Strong Normalization for HA + EM1 by Non-Deterministic Choice
We study the strong normalization of a new Curry-Howard correspondence for HA
+ EM1, constructive Heyting Arithmetic with the excluded middle on
Sigma01-formulas. The proof-term language of HA + EM1 consists in the lambda
calculus plus an operator ||_a which represents, from the viewpoint of
programming, an exception operator with a delimited scope, and from the
viewpoint of logic, a restricted version of the excluded middle. We give a
strong normalization proof for the system based on a technique of
"non-deterministic immersion".Comment: In Proceedings COS 2013, arXiv:1309.092
Logic in the Tractatus
I present a reconstruction of the logical system of the Tractatus, which differs from classical logic in two ways. It includes an account of Wittgenstein’s “form-series” device, which suffices to express some effectively generated countably infinite disjunctions. And its attendant notion of structure is relativized to the fixed underlying universe of what is named.
There follow three results. First, the class of concepts definable in the system is closed under finitary induction. Second, if the universe of objects is countably infinite, then the property of being a tautology is \Pi^1_1-complete. But third, it is only granted the assumption of countability that the class of tautologies is \Sigma_1-definable in set theory.
Wittgenstein famously urges that logical relationships must show themselves in the structure of signs. He also urges that the size of the universe cannot be prejudged. The results of this paper indicate that there is no single way in which logical relationships could be held to make themselves manifest in signs, which does not prejudge the number of objects
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