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In logic and related fields such as mathematics and philosophy, "if and only if" is paraphrased by the biconditional, a logical connective between statements. The biconditional is true in two cases, where either both statements are true or both are false. The connective is biconditional, and can be likened to the standard material conditional combined with its reverse ("if"); hence the name. The result is that the truth of either one of the connected statements requires the truth of the other, though it is controversial whether the connective thus defined is properly rendered by the English "if and only if"—with its pre-existing meaning. For example, P if and only if Q means that P is true whenever Q is true, and the only case in which P is true is if Q is also true, whereas in the case of P if Q, there could be other scenarios where P is true and Q is false.
The propositional calculus is a branch of logic. It is also called propositional logic, statement logic, sentential calculus, sentential logic, or sometimes zeroth-order logic. It deals with propositions and relations between propositions, including the construction of arguments based on them. Compound propositions are formed by connecting propositions by logical connectives representing the truth functions of conjunction, disjunction, implication, biconditional, and negation. Some sources include other connectives, as in the table below.
In logic, proof by contradiction is a form of proof that establishes the truth or the validity of a proposition, by showing that assuming the proposition to be false leads to a contradiction. Although it is quite freely used in mathematical proofs, not every school of mathematical thought accepts this kind of nonconstructive proof as universally valid.
Planner is a programming language designed by Carl Hewitt at MIT, and first published in 1969. First, subsets such as Micro-Planner and Pico-Planner were implemented, and then essentially the whole language was implemented as Popler by Julian Davies at the University of Edinburgh in the POP-2 programming language. Derivations such as QA4, Conniver, QLISP and Ether were important tools in artificial intelligence research in the 1970s, which influenced commercial developments such as Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) and Automated Reasoning Tool (ART).
In logic and proof theory, natural deduction is a kind of proof calculus in which logical reasoning is expressed by inference rules closely related to the "natural" way of reasoning. This contrasts with Hilbert-style systems, which instead use axioms as much as possible to express the logical laws of deductive reasoning.
In traditional logic, a contradiction occurs when a proposition conflicts either with itself or established fact. It is often used as a tool to detect disingenuous beliefs and bias. Illustrating a general tendency in applied logic, Aristotle's law of noncontradiction states that "It is impossible that the same thing can at the same time both belong and not belong to the same object and in the same respect."
In logic and mathematics, statements and are said to be logically equivalent if they have the same truth value in every model. The logical equivalence of and is sometimes expressed as , , , or , depending on the notation being used. However, these symbols are also used for material equivalence, so proper interpretation would depend on the context. Logical equivalence is different from material equivalence, although the two concepts are intrinsically related.
In logic and mathematics, the logical biconditional, also known as material biconditional or equivalence or biimplication or bientailment, is the logical connective used to conjoin two statements and to form the statement " if and only if ", where is known as the antecedent, and the consequent.
In mathematical logic, sequent calculus is a style of formal logical argumentation in which every line of a proof is a conditional tautology instead of an unconditional tautology. Each conditional tautology is inferred from other conditional tautologies on earlier lines in a formal argument according to rules and procedures of inference, giving a better approximation to the natural style of deduction used by mathematicians than to David Hilbert's earlier style of formal logic, in which every line was an unconditional tautology. More subtle distinctions may exist; for example, propositions may implicitly depend upon non-logical axioms. In that case, sequents signify conditional theorems in a first-order language rather than conditional tautologies.
In mathematical logic, a sequent is a very general kind of conditional assertion.
In mathematical set theory, Cantor's theorem is a fundamental result which states that, for any set , the set of all subsets of known as the power set of has a strictly greater cardinality than itself.
In propositional logic, double negation is the theorem that states that "If a statement is true, then it is not the case that the statement is not true". This is expressed by saying that a proposition A is logically equivalent to not (not-A), or by the formula A ≡ ~(~A) where the sign ≡ expresses logical equivalence and the sign ~ expresses negation.
In mathematical logic, a deduction theorem is a metatheorem that justifies doing conditional proofs from a hypothesis in systems that do not explicitly axiomatize that hypothesis, i.e. to prove an implication A → B, it is sufficient to assume A as a hypothesis and then proceed to derive B. Deduction theorems exist for both propositional logic and first-order logic. The deduction theorem is an important tool in Hilbert-style deduction systems because it permits one to write more comprehensible and usually much shorter proofs than would be possible without it. In certain other formal proof systems the same conveniency is provided by an explicit inference rule; for example natural deduction calls it implication introduction.
In classical logic, intuitionistic logic and similar logical systems, the principle of explosion, or the principle of Pseudo-Scotus, is the law according to which any statement can be proven from a contradiction. That is, from a contradiction, any proposition can be inferred; this is known as deductive explosion.
The cut-elimination theorem is the central result establishing the significance of the sequent calculus. It was originally proved by Gerhard Gentzen in his landmark 1934 paper "Investigations in Logical Deduction" for the systems LJ and LK formalising intuitionistic and classical logic respectively. The cut-elimination theorem states that any judgement that possesses a proof in the sequent calculus making use of the cut rule also possesses a cut-free proof, that is, a proof that does not make use of the cut rule.
Fitch's paradox of knowability is one of the fundamental puzzles of epistemic logic. It provides a challenge to the knowability thesis, which states that every truth is, in principle, knowable. The paradox is that this assumption implies the omniscience principle, which asserts that every truth is known. Essentially, Fitch's paradox asserts that the existence of an unknown truth is unknowable. So if all truths were knowable, it would follow that all truths are in fact known.
In logic and mathematics, contraposition, or transposition, refers to the inference of going from a conditional statement into its logically equivalent contrapositive, and an associated proof method known as § Proof by contrapositive. The contrapositive of a statement has its antecedent and consequent inverted and flipped.
Suppes–Lemmon notation is a natural deductive logic notation system developed by E.J. Lemmon. Derived from Suppes' method, it represents natural deduction proofs as sequences of justified steps. Both methods use inference rules derived from Gentzen's 1934/1935 natural deduction system, in which proofs were presented in tree-diagram form rather than in the tabular form of Suppes and Lemmon. Although the tree-diagram layout has advantages for philosophical and educational purposes, the tabular layout is much more convenient for practical applications.
References
- Fitch, Frederic Brenton (1952). Symbolic Logic: An introduction. Ronald Press Co.
- Barker-Plummer, Dave; Barwise, Jon; Etchemendy, John (2011) [1999]. Language, Proof and Logic (2 ed.). CSLI Publications. p. 606. ISBN 9781575866321.