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Logic Journal of IGPL Advance Access originally published online on February 26, 2008
Logic Journal of IGPL 2008 16(2):195-216; doi:10.1093/jigpal/jzn003
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© The Author, 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

On Ignorance and Contradiction Considered as Truth-Values*

Didier Dubois

IRIT-CNRS, Université de Toulouse, France. E-mail: dubois{at}irit.fr

A critical view of the alleged significance of Belnap four-valued logic for reasoning under inconsistent and incomplete information is provided. The difficulty lies in the confusion between truth-values and information states, when reasoning about Boolean propositions. So our critique is along the lines of previous debates on the relevance of many-valued logics and especially of the extension of the Boolean truth-tables to more than two values as a tool for reasoning about uncertainty. The critique also questions the significance of partial logic.

Received for publication 8 November 2007.

*This paper is based on an invited talk entitled "Some remarks on truth-values and degrees of belief" given at the Workshop "The Challenge of Semantics" Vienna, Austria, July 2004.



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This Article
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