Philosophical Remarks on Three-Valued Logic

• Authors: Tomasz Bigaj

Title variants

PL

Uwagi o logice trójwartościowej

EN

Philosophical Remarks on Three-Valued Logic

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

As it is well known, Jan Lukasiewicz invented his three-valued logic as a result of philosophical considerations concerning the problem of determinism and the status of future contingent sentences. In the article I critically analyse the thesis that the sentential calculus introduced by Lukasiewicz himself actually fulfills his philosophical assumptions. I point out that there are some counterintuitive features of Lukasiewicz three-valued logic. Firstly, there is no clear explanation for adopting specific truth-tables for logical connectives, such as conjunction, disjunction and first of all implication. Secondly, it is by no means clear, why certain classical logical principles should be invalid for future contingents. And thirly, I show that within Lukasiewicz logic it is possible to construct a „paradoxical” sentence, namely a conditional which changes in time its logical value from truth to falsity. This fact obviously contradicts Lukasiewicz's philosophical reading of his three truth values, according to which true sentences are already positively determined, false sentences are negatively determined, and possible sentences are neither positively, nor negatively determined. Above-mentioned facts justify in my opinion the thesis that Lukasiewicz's three-valued logic does not satisfy his philosophical intuitions. For this purpose more appropriate seems to be sentential calculus based on the so-called supervaluation. It is three-valued, non-extentional calculus, which nevertheless preserves all tautologies of the classical logic. At the end of the article I consider the possibility of introducing to this calculus modal operators.

• Publisher: University of Warsaw, Institute of Philosophy
• Journal: Filozofia Nauki
• Year: 1997
• Volume: 5
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 113-121

Dates

published

1997-09-01

Contributors

author

Tomasz Bigaj