Propositional and predicate logics of incomplete information

International audienceOne of the most common scenarios of handling incomplete information occurs in relational databases. They describe in-complete knowledge with three truth values, using Kleene’s logic for propositional formulae and a rather peculiar exten-sion to predicate calculus. This design by a committee from several decades ago is now part of the standard adopted by vendors of database management systems. But is it really the right way to handle incompleteness in propositional and pred-icate logics?Our goal is to answer this question. Using an epistemic ap-proach, we first characterize possible levels of partial knowl-edge about propositions, which leads to six truth values. We impose rationality conditions on the semantics of the connec-tives of the propositional logic, and prove that Kleene’s logic is the maximal sublogic to which the standard optimization rules apply, thereby justifying this design choice. For exten-sions to predicate logic, however, we show that the additional truth values are not necessary: every many-valued extension of first-order logic over databases with incomplete informa-tion represented by null values is no more powerful than the usual two-valued logic with the standard Boolean interpreta-tion of the connectives. We use this observation to analyze the logic underlying SQL query evaluation, and conclude that the many-valued extension for handling incompleteness does not add any expressiveness to it

What is an Ideal Logic for Reasoning with Inconsistency?

Abstract Many AI applications are based on some underlying logic that tolerates inconsistent information in a non-trivial way. However, it is not always clear what should be the exact nature of such a logic, and how to choose one for a specific application. In this paper, we formulate a list of desirable properties of "ideal" logics for reasoning with inconsistency, identify a variety of logics that have these properties, and provide a systematic way of constructing, for every n > 2, a family of such n-valued logics