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Paraconsistent logic

Type of formal logic

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Through Logic, Philosophy and Propositional logic

Inconsistency-tolerant logics have been discussed since at least 1910 (and arguably much earlier, for example in the writings of Aristotle); however, the term paraconsistent ("beside the consistent") was coined in 1976, by the Peruvian philosopher Francisco Miró Quesada Cantuarias, under request of Newton da Costa, who is often credited as the creator of the field. The study of paraconsistent logic has been dubbed paraconsistency, which encompasses the school of dialetheism.

Definition

In classical logic (as well as intuitionistic logic and most other logics), contradictions entail everything. This feature, known as the principle of explosion or ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet (Latin, "from a contradiction, anything follows") can be expressed formally as

Which means: if P and its negation ¬P are both assumed to be true, then of the two claims P and (some arbitrary) A, at least one is true. Therefore, P or A is true. However, if we know that either P or A is true, and also that P is false (that ¬P is true) we can conclude that A, which could be anything, is true. Thus if a theory contains a single inconsistency, the theory is trivial – that is, it has every sentence as a theorem.

The characteristic or defining feature of a paraconsistent logic is that it rejects the principle of explosion. As a result, paraconsistent logics, unlike classical and other logics, can be used to formalize inconsistent but non-trivial theories.

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