An informational view of classical logic

Theory and Logic Group, and VCLA hosted a talk by Marcello D'Agostino

DATE:	Thursday, October 25, 2018
TIME:	16:30 s.t.
VENUE:	Seminar Room Gödel, Favoritenstrasse 9-11, Ground Floor, (HB EG 10)

ABSTRACT

In this talk the speaker shall present an informational view of classical propositional logic that stems from a kind of informational semantics whereby the meaning of a logical operator is specified solely in terms of the information that is actually possessed by an agent. In this view the inferential power of logical agents is naturally bounded by their limited capability of manipulating “virtual information”, namely information that is not implicitly contained in the data. Although this informational semantics cannot be expressed by any finitely- valued matrix, it can be expressed by a non-deterministic 3-valued matrix that was first introduced by W.V.O. Quine, but ignored by the logical community. The speaker shall discuss this informational semantics and present a specific infinite hierarchy of tractable approximations to classical propositional logic that is based on it. This hierarchy can be used to model the inferential power of resource-bounded agents and admits of a uniform proof-theoretical characterization that is half-way between a classical version of Natural Deduction and the method of semantic tableaux.

Marcello D'AgostinoProfessor of Logic / Department of Philosophy / University of Milan / Head of the Doctoral School in Philosophy and Human Sciences