Motivation and demotivation of a four-valued logic (Q920963)

The fragment of the Ackermann-Anderson-Belnap logic of entailment in whose theorems the principal connective is the conditional arrow flanked only by truth functions, is called the system of tautological entailment (TE). It can be axiomatized in various ways such that, if for all of them we add any of the so-called ``irrelevance axioms'' ((A\(\vee B)\&\sim A\to B\), \(A\to B\vee \sim B\), and A\&\(\sim A\to B)\), we obtain the system sometimes called that of tautological implication (TI), in which \(A\to B\) captures exactly ``it is truth-functionally impossible that A\&\(\sim B\) is true''. Smiley first discovered that it is characterized by special four-valued matrices. Belnap has interpreted the matrices in a way that he claims well motivates the system for some practical purposes. There are two interesting papers by Belnap about this question, offering two arguments for the usefulness of four-valued logic. In this paper, after presenting in a simple way Belnap's arguments, the author argues that one of them, which rests on interpreting valuations as states of our information, when taken seriously, collapses into an argument for two-valued logic in which relevance is lost; and that the other argument, resting on a thesis called by Belnap Scott's thesis, is not an argument for its usefulness.