On the interpretation of Aristotelian syllogistic
- 1 June 1956
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in The Journal of Symbolic Logic
- Vol. 21 (2) , 137-147
- https://doi.org/10.2307/2268752
Abstract
The main purpose of this note is to prove (theorem 11, § 5) that, in any interpretation of the formalisation of Aristotelian syllogistic given by Łukasiewicz [4], it is always possible to associate with each element a a non-null sub-class φ(a) of some ‘universal’ class V in such a way that ‘Aab’ (all a are b), ‘Iab’ (some a are b) are equivalent respectively to ‘φ(a) is contained in φ(b)’, ‘φ(a) has a non-null intersection with φ(b)’. Similarly (theorem 6, §4) we show that in Wedberg's system [14] with primitives ‘Aab’, ‘a’ (not a), it is possible to find a mapping a → φ(a) as above such that ‘Aab’ is equivalent to ‘φ(a) is contained in φ(b)’ and φ(a‘ is equal to φ(a)’, the complement of φ(a) with respect to V. Thus, if we make the preliminary step of identifying elements a, b such that Aab and Aba both hold (i.e. taking equivalence classes with respect to the relation Aab & Aba), we are left with essentially only one kind of interpretation for these systems, namely the ‘normal’ interpretation by classes. Slupecki [11], [12] has proved that Łukasiewicz's system is a complete and decidable theory of the relations of inclusion and intersection of non-null classes, and Wedberg [14] has proved that his system is a complete and decidable theory of the relation of inclusion and the operation of complementation for nonnull, non-universal classes. Using the above-mentioned embedding theorem, we are able to obtain (theorems 9, 6, §§ 5, 4) very simple proofs of these results.Keywords
This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit:
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- Zur Theorie der aussagenlogischen MatrizenMathematische Zeitschrift, 1951