A Nonmonotonic Sequent Calculus for Inferentialist Expressivists

I am presenting a sequent calculus that extends a nonmonotonic consequence relation over an atomic language to a logically complex language. The system is in line with two guiding philosophical ideas: (i) logical inferentialism and (ii) logical expressivism. The extension defined by the sequent rules is conservative. The conditional tracks the consequence relation and negation tracks incoherence. Besides the ordinary propositional connectives, the sequent calculus introduces a new kind of modal operator that marks implications that hold monotonically. Transitivity fails, but for good reasons. Intuitionism and classical logic can easily be recovered from the system

Partial Quantifier Elimination By Certificate Clauses

We study partial quantifier elimination (PQE) for propositional CNF formulas. In contrast to full quantifier elimination, in PQE, one can limit the set of clauses taken out of the scope of quantifiers to a small subset of target clauses. The appeal of PQE is twofold. First, PQE can be dramatically simpler than full quantifier elimination. Second, it provides a language for performing incremental computations. Many verification problems (e.g. equivalence checking and model checking) are inherently incremental and so can be solved in terms of PQE. Our approach is based on deriving clauses depending only on unquantified variables that make the target clauses $\mathit{redundant}$. Proving redundancy of a target clause is done by construction of a ``certificate'' clause implying the former. We describe a PQE algorithm called $\mathit{START}$ that employs the approach above. We apply $\mathit{START}$ to generating properties of a design implementation that are not implied by specification. The existence of an $\mathit{unwanted}$ property means that this implementation is buggy. Our experiments with HWMCC-13 benchmarks suggest that $\mathit{START}$ can be used for generating properties of real-life designs

Intuitionism and the Modal Logic of Vagueness

Intuitionistic logic provides an elegant solution to the Sorites Paradox. Its acceptance has been hampered by two factors. First, the lack of an accepted semantics for languages containing vague terms has led even philosophers sympathetic to intuitionism to complain that no explanation has been given of why intuitionistic logic is the correct logic for such languages. Second, switching from classical to intuitionistic logic, while it may help with the Sorites, does not appear to offer any advantages when dealing with the so-called paradoxes of higher-order vagueness. We offer a proposal that makes strides on both issues. We argue that the intuitionist’s characteristic rejection of any third alethic value alongside true and false is best elaborated by taking the normal modal system S4M to be the sentential logic of the operator ‘it is clearly the case that’. S4M opens the way to an account of higher-order vagueness which avoids the paradoxes that have been thought to infect the notion. S4M is one of the modal counterparts of the intuitionistic sentential calculus and we use this fact to explain why IPC is the correct sentential logic to use when reasoning with vague statements. We also show that our key results go through in an intuitionistic version of S4M. Finally, we deploy our analysis to reply to Timothy Williamson’s objections to intuitionistic treatments of vagueness

Iterated reflection principles over full disquotational truth

Iterated reflection principles have been employed extensively to unfold epistemic commitments that are incurred by accepting a mathematical theory. Recently this has been applied to theories of truth. The idea is to start with a collection of Tarski-biconditionals and arrive by finitely iterated reflection at strong compositional truth theories. In the context of classical logic it is incoherent to adopt an initial truth theory in which A and 'A is true' are inter-derivable. In this article we show how in the context of a weaker logic, which we call Basic De Morgan Logic, we can coherently start with such a fully disquotational truth theory and arrive at a strong compositional truth theory by applying a natural uniform reflection principle a finite number of times