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On the interpretation of Aristotelian syllogistic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2014

J. C. Shepherdson
J. C. Shepherdson*
Affiliation:
The University of Bristol, Bristol, England
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Symbolic Logic , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 1956 , pp. 137 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 1956

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References

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