Substructural logic

Last updated

In logic, a substructural logic is a logic lacking one of the usual structural rules (e.g. of classical and intuitionistic logic), such as weakening, contraction, exchange or associativity. Two of the more significant substructural logics are relevance logic and linear logic.

Contents

Examples

In a sequent calculus, one writes each line of a proof as

.

Here the structural rules are rules for rewriting the LHS of the sequent, denoted Γ, initially conceived of as a string (sequence) of propositions. The standard interpretation of this string is as conjunction: we expect to read

as the sequent notation for

(AandB) impliesC.

Here we are taking the RHS Σ to be a single proposition C (which is the intuitionistic style of sequent); but everything applies equally to the general case, since all the manipulations are taking place to the left of the turnstile symbol .

Since conjunction is a commutative and associative operation, the formal setting-up of sequent theory normally includes structural rules for rewriting the sequent Γ accordingly—for example for deducing

from

.

There are further structural rules corresponding to the idempotent and monotonic properties of conjunction: from

we can deduce

.

Also from

one can deduce, for any B,

.

Linear logic, in which duplicated hypotheses 'count' differently from single occurrences, leaves out both of these rules, while relevant (or relevance) logics merely leaves out the latter rule, on the ground that B is clearly irrelevant to the conclusion.

The above are basic examples of structural rules. It is not that these rules are contentious, when applied in conventional propositional calculus. They occur naturally in proof theory, and were first noticed there (before receiving a name).

Premise composition

There are numerous ways to compose premises (and in the multiple-conclusion case, conclusions as well). One way is to collect them into a set. But since e.g. {a,a} = {a} we have contraction for free if premises are sets. We also have associativity and permutation (or commutativity) for free as well, among other properties. In substructural logics, typically premises are not composed into sets, but rather they are composed into more fine-grained structures, such as trees or multisets (sets that distinguish multiple occurrences of elements) or sequences of formulae. For example, in linear logic, since contraction fails, the premises must be composed in something at least as fine-grained as multisets.

History

Substructural logics are a relatively young field. The first conference on the topic was held in October 1990 in Tübingen, as "Logics with Restricted Structural Rules". During the conference, Kosta Došen proposed the term "substructural logics", which is now in use today.

See also

Related Research Articles

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. Propositions that contain no logical connectives are called atomic propositions.

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.

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 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 programming language theory and proof theory, the Curry–Howard correspondence is the direct relationship between computer programs and mathematical proofs.

A paraconsistent logic is an attempt at a logical system to deal with contradictions in a discriminating way. Alternatively, paraconsistent logic is the subfield of logic that is concerned with studying and developing "inconsistency-tolerant" systems of logic, which reject the principle of explosion.

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.

Linear logic is a substructural logic proposed by Jean-Yves Girard as a refinement of classical and intuitionistic logic, joining the dualities of the former with many of the constructive properties of the latter. Although the logic has also been studied for its own sake, more broadly, ideas from linear logic have been influential in fields such as programming languages, game semantics, and quantum physics, as well as linguistics, particularly because of its emphasis on resource-boundedness, duality, and interaction.

Monotonicity of entailment is a property of many logical systems such that if a sentence follows deductively from a given set of sentences then it also follows deductively from any superset of those sentences. A corollary is that if a given argument is deductively valid, it cannot become invalid by the addition of extra premises.

In the logical discipline of proof theory, a structural rule is an inference rule of a sequent calculus that does not refer to any logical connective but instead operates on the sequents directly. Structural rules often mimic the intended meta-theoretic properties of the logic. Logics that deny one or more of the structural rules are classified as substructural logics.

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.

Bunched logic is a variety of substructural logic proposed by Peter O'Hearn and David Pym. Bunched logic provides primitives for reasoning about resource composition, which aid in the compositional analysis of computer and other systems. It has category-theoretic and truth-functional semantics, which can be understood in terms of an abstract concept of resource, and a proof theory in which the contexts Γ in an entailment judgement Γ ⊢ A are tree-like structures (bunches) rather than lists or (multi)sets as in most proof calculi. Bunched logic has an associated type theory, and its first application was in providing a way to control the aliasing and other forms of interference in imperative programs. The logic has seen further applications in program verification, where it is the basis of the assertion language of separation logic, and in systems modelling, where it provides a way to decompose the resources used by components of a system.

In mathematical logic, structural proof theory is the subdiscipline of proof theory that studies proof calculi that support a notion of analytic proof, a kind of proof whose semantic properties are exposed. When all the theorems of a logic formalised in a structural proof theory have analytic proofs, then the proof theory can be used to demonstrate such things as consistency, provide decision procedures, and allow mathematical or computational witnesses to be extracted as counterparts to theorems, the kind of task that is more often given to model theory.

In mathematical logic, the cut rule is an inference rule of sequent calculus. It is a generalisation of the classical modus ponens inference rule. Its meaning is that, if a formula A appears as a conclusion in one proof and a hypothesis in another, then another proof in which the formula A does not appear can be deduced. In the particular case of the modus ponens, for example occurrences of man are eliminated of Every man is mortal, Socrates is a man to deduce Socrates is mortal.

In logic, a rule of inference is admissible in a formal system if the set of theorems of the system does not change when that rule is added to the existing rules of the system. In other words, every formula that can be derived using that rule is already derivable without that rule, so, in a sense, it is redundant. The concept of an admissible rule was introduced by Paul Lorenzen (1955).

Idempotency of entailment is a property of logical systems that states that one may derive the same consequences from many instances of a hypothesis as from just one. This property can be captured by a structural rule called contraction, and in such systems one may say that entailment is idempotent if and only if contraction is an admissible rule.

In mathematical logic, monoidal t-norm based logic, the logic of left-continuous t-norms, is one of the t-norm fuzzy logics. It belongs to the broader class of substructural logics, or logics of residuated lattices; it extends the logic of commutative bounded integral residuated lattices by the axiom of prelinearity.

In mathematical logic, the hypersequent framework is an extension of the proof-theoretical framework of sequent calculi used in structural proof theory to provide analytic calculi for logics that are not captured in the sequent framework. A hypersequent is usually taken to be a finite multiset of ordinary sequents, written

A non-normal modal logic is a variant of modal logic that deviates from the basic principles of normal modal logics.

References

    Further reading