Abstract

Syllogistics reduces to only two rules of inference: monotonicity and symmetry, plus a third if one wants to take existential import into account. We give an implementation that uses only the monotonicity and symmetry rules, with an addendum for the treatment of existential import. Soundness follows from the monotonicity properties and symmetry properties of the Aristotelean quantifiers, while completeness for syllogistic theory is proved by direct inspection of the valid syllogisms. Next, the valid syllogisms are decomposed in terms of the rules they involve. The implementation uses Haskell [8], and is given in ‘literate programming’ style [9].