Contradictory Information: Too Much of a Good Thing [Book Review]

Journal of Philosophical Logic 39 (4):425 - 452 (2010)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Both I and Belnap, motivated the "Belnap-Dunn 4-valued Logic" by talk of the reasoner being simply "told true" (T) and simply "told false" (F), which leaves the options of being neither "told true" nor "told false" (N), and being both "told true" and "told false" (B). Belnap motivated these notions by consideration of unstructured databases that allow for negative information as well as positive information (even when they conflict). We now experience this on a daily basis with the Web. But the 4-valued logic is deductive in nature, and its matrix is discrete: there are just four values. In this paper I investigate embedding the 4-valued logic into a context of probability. Jøsang's Subjective Logic introduced uncertainty to allow for degrees of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty. We extend this so as to allow for two kinds of uncertainty— that in which the reasoner has too little information (ignorance) and that in which the reasoner has too much information (conflicted). Jøsang's "Opinion Triangle" becomes an "Opinion Tetrahedron" and the 4-values can be seen as its vertices. I make/prove various observations concerning the relation of non-classical "probability" to non-classical logic

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 91,386

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-06-12

Downloads
124 (#142,568)

6 months
7 (#411,886)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

James Dunn
University of Edinburgh

Citations of this work

Substructural epistemic logics.Igor Sedlár - 2015 - Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics 25 (3):256-285.
An expansion of first-order Belnap-Dunn logic.K. Sano & H. Omori - 2014 - Logic Journal of the IGPL 22 (3):458-481.
The Lattice of Super-Belnap Logics.Adam Přenosil - 2023 - Review of Symbolic Logic 16 (1):114-163.

View all 12 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

The Foundations of Statistics.Leonard J. Savage - 1954 - Wiley Publications in Statistics.
Logical foundations of probability.Rudolf Carnap - 1950 - Chicago]: Chicago University of Chicago Press.
Knowledge and belief.Jaakko Hintikka - 1962 - Ithaca, N.Y.,: Cornell University Press.
Introduction to metamathematics.Stephen Cole Kleene - 1952 - Groningen: P. Noordhoff N.V..
In contradiction: a study of the transconsistent.Graham Priest - 1987 - New York: Oxford University Press.

View all 39 references / Add more references