Sankha S. Basu

Paraconsistency is commonly defined and/or characterized as the failure of a principle of explosion. The various standard forms of explosion involve one or more logical operators or connectives, among which the negation operator is the most frequent and primary. In this article, we start by asking whether a negation operator is essential for describing explosion and paraconsistency. In other words, is it possible to describe a principle of explosion and hence a notion of paraconsistency that is independent of connectives? A negation-free paraconsistency resulting from the failure of a generalized principle of explosion is presented first. We also derive a notion of quasi-negation from this and investigate its properties. Next, more general principles of explosion are considered. These are also negation-free; moreover, these principles gradually move away from the idea that an explosion requires a statement and its opposite. Thus, these principles can capture the explosion observed in logics where a statement and its negation explode only in the presence of additional information, such as in the logics of formal inconsistency.

In this paper, we study some classes of logical structures from the universal logic standpoint, viz., those of the Tarski- and the Lindenbaum-types. The characterization theorems for the Tarski- and two of the four different Lindenbaum-type logical structures have been proved as well. The separations between the five classes of logical structures, viz., the four Lindenbaum-types and the Tarski-type have been established via examples. Finally, we study the logical structures that are of both Tarski- and a Lindenbaum-type, show their separations, and end with characterization, adequacy, minimality, and representation theorems for one of the Tarski–Lindenbaum-type logical structures.

In this paper, we study two companions of a logic, viz., the left variable inclusion companion and the restricted rules companion, their nature and interrelations, especially in connection with paraconsistency. A sufficient condition for the two companions to coincide has also been proved. Two new logical systems—intuitionistic paraconsistent weak Kleene logic (IPWK) and paraconsistent pre-rough logic (PPRL)—are presented here as examples of logics of left variable inclusion. IPWK is the left variable inclusion companion of intuitionistic propositional logic and is also the restricted rules companion of it. PPRL, on the other hand, is the left variable inclusion companion of pre-rough logic but differs from the restricted rules companion of it. We have discussed algebraic semantics for these logics in terms of Płonka sums. This amounts to introducing a contaminating truth value, intended to denote a state of indeterminacy.