Inquisitive Logic Research Articles

Esakia duals of regular Heyting algebras

We investigate in this article regular Heyting algebras by means of Esakia duality. In particular, we give a characterisation of Esakia spaces dual to regular Heyting algebras and we show that there are continuum-many varieties of Heyting algebras generated by regular Heyting algebras. We also study several logical applications of these classes of objects and we use them to provide novel topological completeness theorems for inquisitive logic, DNA\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\ exttt{DNA}$$\\end{document}-logics and dependence logic.

Something Valid This Way Comes: A Study of Neologicism and Proof-Theoretic Validity

AbstractThe interplay of philosophical ambitions and technical reality have given birth to rich and interesting approaches to explain the oft-claimed special character of mathematical and logical knowledge. Two projects stand out both for their audacity and their innovativeness. These are logicism and proof-theoretic semantics. This dissertation contains three chapters exploring the limits of these two projects. In both cases I find the formal results offer a mixed blessing to the philosophical projects.Chapter 1. Is a logicist bound to the claim that as a matter of analytic truth there is an actual infinity of objects? If Hume’s Principle is analytic then in the standard setting the answer appears to be yes. Hodes’s work pointed to a way out by offering a modal picture in which only a potential infinity was posited. However, this project was abandoned due to apparent failures of cross-world predication. I re-explore this idea and discover that in the setting of the potential infinite one can interpret first-order Peano arithmetic, but not second-order Peano arithmetic. I conclude that in order for the logicist to weaken the metaphysically loaded claim of necessary actual infinities, they must also weaken the mathematics they recover.Chapter 2. There have been several recent results bringing into focus the super-intuitionistic nature of most notions of proof-theoretic validity. But there has been very little work evaluating the consequences of these results. In this chapter, I explore the question of whether these results undermine the claim that proof-theoretic validity shows us which inferences follow from the meaning of the connectives when defined by their introduction rules. It is argued that the super-intuitionistic inferences are valid due to the correspondence between the treatment of the atomic formulas and more complex formulas. And so the goals of proof-theoretic validity are not undermined.Chapter 3. Prawitz (1971) conjectured that proof-theoretic validity offers a semantics for intuitionistic logic. This conjecture has recently been proven false by Piecha and Schroeder-Heister (2019). This chapter resolves one of the questions left open by this recent result by showing the extensional alignment of proof-theoretic validity and general inquisitive logic. General inquisitive logic is a generalisation of inquisitive semantics, a uniform semantics for questions and assertions. The chapter further defines a notion of quasi-proof-theoretic validity by restricting proof-theoretic validity to allow double negation elimination for atomic formulas and proves the extensional alignment of quasi-proof-theoretic validity and inquisitive logic.Abstract prepared by Will Stafford extracted partially from the dissertation.E-mail: stafford@flu.cas.czURL: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/33c6h00c

Maheśa Chandra’s Exposition of the Navya-Nyāya Concept of “Cognition” (jñāna) from the Perspective of Inquisitive Logic

The present paper is about three concepts which are crucially involved in Gaṅgeśa's interpretation of a Mīmāṃsā argument against the well-known design inference of the existence of God in Nyāya, namely the concepts “cognition” (jñāna), “certitude” (niścaya) and “doubt” (saṃśaya). According to Maheśa Chandra, the author of the Navya-Nyāya manual Brief Notes on the Modern Nyāya System of Philosophy and its Technical Terms, certitude and doubt are the two varieties of cognition. He illustrates the verbal expression of certitudes by means of declaratives and the verbal expression of doubts by means of interrogatives (functioning as polar or alternative questions). He notes also that different credence levels might be associated with the alternatives involved in a speaker’s doubt. A biassed question in the form of a tag interrogative might be an appropriate way to express such a doubt. In Western logic the idea to treat declaratives and interrogatives on a par, which is anticipated by the Navya-Naiyāyikas' use of the unifying concept of “cognition”, goes back to Frege’s distinction between the semantic content (the “thought”) of a sentence and its force and it was recently elaborated by Ciardelli, Farkas, Groenendijk, Roelofsen et al., the founders of a new branch in logic called “inquisitive logic”. In the present paper we will discuss Maheśa Chandra's succinct exposition of the Navya-Naiyāyikas' innovative approach from the perspective of this type of logic. As an offshoot of our analysis we will try to elucidate Gaṅgeśa's apologetic concerns about the well-known design inference of the existence of God in Nyāya and its liability to be vitiated by a dubious upādhi.

Inquisitive logic as an epistemic logic of knowing how

In this paper, we present an alternative interpretation of propositional inquisitive logic as an epistemic logic of knowing how. In our setting, an inquisitive logic formula α being supported by a state is formalized as knowing how to resolve α (more colloquially, knowing how α is true) holds on the S5 epistemic model corresponding to the state. Based on this epistemic interpretation, we use a dynamic epistemic logic with both know-how and know-that operators to capture the epistemic information behind the innocent-looking connectives in inquisitive logic. We show that the set of valid know-how formulas corresponds precisely to the inquisitive logic. The main result is a complete axiomatization with intuitive axioms using the full dynamic epistemic language. Moreover, we show that the know-how operator and the dynamic operator can both be eliminated without changing the expressivity over models, which is consistent with the modal translation of inquisitive logic existing in the literature. We hope our framework can give an intuitive alternative interpretation to various concepts and technical results in inquisitive logic, and also provide a powerful and flexible tool to handle both the inquisitive reasoning and declarative reasoning in an epistemic context.

AN ALGEBRAIC APPROACH TO INQUISITIVE AND -LOGICS

AbstractThis article provides an algebraic study of the propositional system $\mathtt {InqB}$ of inquisitive logic. We also investigate the wider class of $\mathtt {DNA}$ -logics, which are negative variants of intermediate logics, and the corresponding algebraic structures, $\mathtt {DNA}$ -varieties. We prove that the lattice of $\mathtt {DNA}$ -logics is dually isomorphic to the lattice of $\mathtt {DNA}$ -varieties. We characterise maximal and minimal intermediate logics with the same negative variant, and we prove a suitable version of Birkhoff’s classic variety theorems. We also introduce locally finite $\mathtt {DNA}$ -varieties and show that these varieties are axiomatised by the analogues of Jankov formulas. Finally, we prove that the lattice of extensions of $\mathtt {InqB}$ is dually isomorphic to the ordinal $\omega +1$ and give an axiomatisation of these logics via Jankov $\mathtt {DNA}$ -formulas. This shows that these extensions coincide with the so-called inquisitive hierarchy of [9].1

Epistemic extensions of substructural inquisitive logics

Abstract In this paper, we study the epistemic extensions of distributive substructural inquisitive logics. Substructural inquisitive logics are logics of questions based on substructural logics of declarative sentences. They generalize basic inquisitive logic which is based on the classical logic of declaratives. We show that if the underlying substructural logic is distributive, the generalization can be extended to embrace also the epistemic modalities ‘knowing whether’ and ‘wondering whether’ that are applicable to questions. We construct a semantic framework for a language of propositional substructural logics enriched with a question-forming operator (inquisitive disjunction) and epistemic modalities. We show that within this framework, one can define a canonical model with suitable properties for any (syntactically defined) epistemic inquisitive logic. This leads to a general approach to completeness proofs for such logics. A deductive system for the weakest epistemic inquisitive logic is described and completeness proved for this special case using the general method.

Inquisitive Propositional Dynamic Logic

This paper combines propositional dynamic logic ( $${\textsf {PDL}}$$ ) with propositional inquisitive logic ( $$\textsf {InqB}$$ ). The result of this combination is a logical system $$\textsf {InqPDL}$$ that conservatively extends both $${\textsf {PDL}}$$ and $$\textsf {InqB}$$ , and, moreover, allows for an interaction of the question-forming operator from $$\textsf {InqB}$$ with the structured modalities from $${\textsf {PDL}}$$ . We study this system from a semantic as well as a syntactic point of view. These two perspectives are linked via a completeness proof, which also shows that $$\textsf {InqPDL}$$ is decidable.

Reducing Contrastive Knowledge

According to one form of epistemic contrastivism, due to Jonathan Schaffer, knowledge is not a binary relation between an agent and a proposition, but a ternary relation between an agent, a proposition, and a context-basing question. In a slogan: to know is to know the answer to a question. I argue, first, that Schaffer-style epistemic contrastivism can be semantically represented in inquisitive dynamic epistemic logic, a recent implementation of inquisitive semantics in the framework of dynamic epistemic logic; second, that within inquisitive dynamic epistemic logic, the contrastive ternary knowledge operator is reducible to the standard binary one. The reduction shows, I argue, that Schaffer’s argument in favor of contrastivism is compatible with a binary picture of knowledge. This undercuts the force of the argument in favor of contrastivism.

Questions and Dependency in Intuitionistic Logic

In recent years, the logic of questions and dependencies has been investigated in the closely related frameworks of inquisitive logic and dependence logic. These investigations have assumed classical logic as the background logic of statements, and added formulas expressing questions and dependencies to this classical core. In this paper, we broaden the scope of these investigations by studying questions and dependency in the context of intuitionistic logic. We propose an intuitionistic team semantics, where teams are embedded within intuitionistic Kripke models. The associated logic is a conservative extension of intuitionistic logic with questions and dependence formulas. We establish a number of results about this logic, including a normal form result, a completeness result, and translations to classical inquisitive logic and modal dependence logic.

Action models in inquisitive logic

Information exchange can be viewed as a process of asking questions and answering them. While dynamic epistemic logic traditionally focuses on statements, recent developments have been concerned with ways of incorporating questions. One approach, based on the framework of inquisitive semantics, is inquisitive dynamic epistemic logic (textsf {IDEL}). In this system, agents are represented with issues as well as information. On the dynamic level, it can model actions that raise new issues. Compared to other approaches, a limitation of textsf {IDEL} is that it can only encode public announcements. textsf {IDEL} can be refined to encode private questions, by merging its static basis, inquisitive epistemic logic (textsf {IEL}), with action model logic (textsf {AML}). This can be done in two ways, namely by enriching action models with questions as possible actions or with issues concerning which action takes place. This paper describes the corresponding dynamic logics, which are conservative extensions of both textsf {AML} and textsf {IEL}, and a sound and complete axiomatization is given for both.

Supervenience, Dependence, Disjunction

This paper explores variations on and connections between the topics mentioned in its title, using as something of an anchor the discussion in Valentin Goranko and Antti Kuusisto’s “Logics for propositional determinacy and independence”, a venture into what the authors call the logic of determinacy, which they contrast with (a demodalized version of) Jouko Vaananen’s modal dependence logic. As they make clear in their discussion, these logics are closely connected with the topics of noncontingency and supervenience. Two opening sections of the present paper address some of these connections, including related earlier logical work by the present author as well as very recent work by Jie Fan. The Vaananen-inspired treatment is presented in a third section, and then, in Sections 4 and 5, as a kind of centerpiece for the discussion, we follow Goranko and Kuusisto in elaborating one principal reason offered for preferring their own approach over that treatment, which concerns some anomalies over the behaviour of disjunction in the latter treatment. Sections 6 and 7 look at dependence and (several different versions of) disjunction in inquisitive logic, especially as presented by Ivano Ciardelli. Section 8 revisits the less formal property-supervenience literature with issues from the first two sections of the paper in mind, and we conclude with a Postscript addressing a further conceptual issue pertaining to the relation between modal and quantificational dependence logics.

UNIFORM DEFINABILITY IN PROPOSITIONAL DEPENDENCE LOGIC

AbstractBoth propositional dependence logic and inquisitive logic are expressively complete. As a consequence, every formula in the language of inquisitive logic with intuitionistic disjunction or intuitionistic implication can be translated equivalently into a formula in the language of propositional dependence logic without these two connectives. We show that although such a (noncompositional) translation exists, neither intuitionistic disjunction nor intuitionistic implication is uniformly definable in propositional dependence logic.

Structural completeness in propositional logics of dependence

In this paper we prove that three of the main propositional logics of dependence (including propositional dependence logic and inquisitive logic), none of which is structural, are structurally complete with respect to a class of substitutions under which the logics are closed. We obtain an analogues result with respect to stable substitutions, for the negative variants of some well-known intermediate logics, which are intermediate theories that are closely related to inquisitive logic.

Propositional logics of dependence

In this paper, we study logics of dependence on the propositional level. We prove that several interesting propositional logics of dependence, including propositional dependence logic, propositional intuitionistic dependence logic as well as propositional inquisitive logic, are expressively complete and have disjunctive or conjunctive normal forms. We provide deduction systems and prove the completeness theorems for these logics.

A Generalization of Inquisitive Semantics

This paper introduces a generalized version of inquisitive semantics, denoted as GIS, and concentrates especially on the role of disjunction in this general framework. Two alternative semantic conditions for disjunction are compared: the first one corresponds to the so-called tensor operator of dependence logic, and the second one is the standard condition for inquisitive disjunction. It is shown that GIS is intimately related to intuitionistic logic and its Kripke semantics. Using this framework, it is shown that the main results concerning inquisitive semantics, especially the axiomatization of inquisitive logic, can be viewed as particular cases of more general phenomena. In this connection, a class of non-standard superintuitionistic logics is introduced and studied. These logics share many interesting features with inquisitive logic, which is the strongest logic of this class.

Weak Negation in Inquisitive Semantics

This paper introduces and explores a conservative extension of inquisitive logic. In particular, weak negation is added to the standard propositional language of inquisitive semantics, and it is shown that, although we lose some general semantic properties of the original framework, such an enrichment enables us to model some previously inexpressible speech acts such as weak denial and `might'-assertions. As a result, a new modal logic emerges. For this logic, a Fitch-style system of natural deduction is formulated. The main result of this paper is a theorem establishing the completeness of the system with respect to inquisitive semantics with weak negation. At the conclusion of the paper, the possibility of extending the framework to the level of first order logic is briefly discussed.