A note on irrelevance in inductive logic (Q543531)

This paper can be seen as a call to arms to better understand relevance and irrelevance in Carnap's framework of inductive (monadic) predicate logic. The context is the usual, i.e., there are countably many constants \(a_1,a_2\dots\) that are said to exhaust the universe, finitely many unary relation symbols \(P_1,\dots,P_q\), and the usual logical connectives \(\vee,\wedge,\neg,\forall,\exists.\) Let \textit{SL} and \textit{QFSL} be the sentences, respectively quantifier-free sentences, of this language. The authors motivate and formulate a notion of irrelevance every probability function \(w\) on \textit{QFSL} should satisfy. The notion is called Weak Irrelevance Principle (WIP), which states that, for all \(\varphi,\theta\in {\mathit QFSL}\) which do not mention a relation symbol or constant in common, it holds that \(w(\theta|\varphi)=w(\theta).\) The authors then introduce a family of probability functions \(u^{\overline p,L}_n\) for which it holds that \(\lim_{n\to\infty}u^{\overline p,L}_n=u^{\overline p,L}.\) The \(u^{\overline p,L}\) have also appeared in other papers by the authors and by the reviewer, where they were used to study polyadic inductive logic, in particular for the study of Language Invariance (LI) and Instantial Relevance (IR); cf. [\textit{J. Landes, J. Paris} and \textit{A. Vencovská}, Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 5378, 162--169 (2009; Zbl 1203.03031)]. The authors then show that the \(u^{\overline p,L}_n\) and \(u^{\overline p,L}\) satisfy WIP and the principles of Constant Exchangeability (Ex) and Atom Exchangeability (Ax), furthermore the \(u^{\overline p,L}_n\) and \(u^{\overline p,L}\) satisfy LI with Ex, Ax and WIP. The next result presented is that the \(u^{\overline p,L}_n\) are the only probability functions satisfying LI with Ex, Ax and WIP. As a corollary it follows that the \(u^{\overline p,L}_n\) are in fact equal to some \(u^{\overline q,L}\). The \(u^{\overline q,L}\) are generalizations of the Paris-Nix continuum (given by the \(w^{\delta}\)). Thus, the \(w^{\delta}\) satisfy LI with Ex, Ax, WIP and the Generalized Principle of Instantial Relevance (GPIR). The intriguing part is that also the \(w^{\delta}\) appear to be an utterly reasonable choice for a rational agent choosing a probability function representing his beliefs, the \(w^{\delta}\) do not in general satisfy the classical Johnson Sufficientness Principle (JSP). Only the extreme points of continuum satisfy JSP, namely for \(w^0=c_{\infty}\) and \(w^{1}=c_0\), where the \(c_{\lambda}\) are the extreme points of Carnap's influential continuum.