Article View: sci.logic
Article #651Re: Multiple Truth Values
From: Torkel Franzen
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 22:29
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 22:29
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3090 bytes
In article <1993Jan12.201545.27599@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU> pratt@Sunburn. Stanford.EDU (Vaughan R. Pratt) writes: >Australian and American courts interrogate witnesses in a language that >presumes intuitionistic logic, in that they draw a distinction between >straight answers and hedged and insist on the former. The distinction between hedging and straight answers has nothing in particular to do with intuitionistic logic, and your statement that it "presumes intuitionistic logic" is quite arbitrary. Furthermore, natural language is not a formal system, and I doubt that it is possible to find anything in the use of natural language corresponding e.g. to the intuitionistic validity of the double negation of Peirce's axiom. This applies equally, of course, to classical propositional logic. Formal logic doesn't tell us a great deal about what reasoning, interrogation, justification, etc in natural language is like. More interesting is the other point you raised, concerning the possibility of interpreting classical in intuitionistic theories via e.g. a Godel translation, where you emphasized that the effect of this is to introduce distinctions where there are none in classical logic. But clearly this in itself tells us nothing about the usefulness or interest of the intuitionistic versions of the theories. We can go on to introduce a large number of logical distinctions, still with Godel-type translations of classical theorems. Such distinctions have no intrinsic value. Looking at the distinctions introduced by intuitionistic logic, they are in part natural in the sense that they have a connection with or correspond to distinctions that we make in mathematics and that we have found useful, such as the distinction between direct and indirect proofs of existential statements. But intuitionistic logic involves very much more than such natural distinctions. For example, the logical distinction between ~~ExP(x) and ExP(x), with P a decidable number-theoretic predicate, corresponds to nothing in ordinary mathematical experience. For another example, the splitting up of the concept of an infinite set of natural numbers into "infinite", "not not infinite", "not bounded" introduces considerable complications, and we don't even know whether it is possible to teach and learn mathematics without "conflating" these concepts. We need to think about such matters as well in considering distinctions.
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Newsgroups: sci.logic Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!mcsun!sunic!sics.se!torkel From: torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen) Subject: Re: Multiple Truth Values In-Reply-To: pratt@Sunburn.Stanford.EDU's message of Tue, 12 Jan 1993 20:15:45 GMT Message-ID: <TORKEL.93Jan12232944@bast.sics.se> Sender: news@sics.se Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista References: <1993Jan11.194737.11729@dcs.qmw.ac.uk> <1993Jan12.083955.19685@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU> <TORKEL.93Jan12110752@lludd.sics.se> <1993Jan12.201545.27599@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU> Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 22:29:44 GMT Lines: 43