Atom exchangeability and instantial relevance (Q1025576)

The authors investigate principles of instantial relevance under the assumption of Constant Exchangeability (EX) and at times Atom Exchangeability (AX) within the framework of unary inductive logic. They first show that the Only Rule is in fact the only rule that allows inductive conclusions of a certain kind. They then go on to study extensions of the Principle of Instantial Relevance that they name Strong (SPIR) and Negative Principle of Instantial Relevance (NPIR). It is proved that from the assumption (EX) and (AX) none of the proposed principles of instantial relevance follows by giving, in the case of (SPIR), counterexamples. Surprisingly these results depend on ostensibly unimportant parameters such as the number of relation symbols in the language. In the last section, connections between the notions of ``language invariance'' and ``recoverability'' are considered under the standing assumption of (AX) and (EX).