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Information Flow and Relevant Logic

“Information Flow and Relevant Logic,” in Logic, Language and Computation: The 1994 Moraga Proceedings, Jerry Seligman and Dag Westerståhl (editors) CSLI Press, 1995, pages 463–477.

John Perry, one of the two founders of the field of situation semantics, indicated in an interview in 1986 that there is some kind of connection between relevant logic and situation semantics.

I do know that a lot of ideas that seemed off the wall when I first encountered them years ago now seem pretty sensible. One example that our commentators don’t mention is relevance logic; there are a lot of themes in that literature that bear on the themes we mention.

In 1992, in Entailment volume 2, Nuel Belnap and J. Michael Dunn hinted at similar ideas. Referring to situation semantics, they wrote

… we do not mean to claim too much here. The Barwise-Perry semantics is clearly independent and its application to natural-language constructions is rich and novel. But we like to think that at least first degree (relevant) entailments have a home there.

In this paper I show that these hints and gestures are true. And perhaps truer than those that made them thought at the time. In this paper I introduce the semantics of relevant logics, then I will sketch the parts of situation theory relevant to our enterprise. Finally, I bring the two together in what is hopefully, a harmonious way.

Details

Author: Greg Restall
Status: Published in 1995

Local file: infflow.pdf (217KB)

Subjects: contraction information models relevant logic situations substructural logic

About

I’m Greg Restall, and this is my website. I work in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Email: greg at consequently.org; Post: School of of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia.

Start at the home page—a summary of the site. The left column is news, archived on the news archive page. The central column contains recent items from the writing page, which lists my publications. These are also categorised by topic. You can follow my links at my account on delicious and occasional short snarky remarks at @consequently on twitter.

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Thought

G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his mother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.’ It’ the qualifier “necessarily” that shows Chesterton possessed a truly philosophical mind. – Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, in Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar …