Paraconsistency Everywhere

“Paraconsistency Everywhere,” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 43 (2002), 147-156. (Appeared in 2004)

Paraconsistent logics are, by definition, inconsistency tolerant: In a paraconsistent logic, inconsistencies need not entail everything. However, there is more than one way a body of information can be inconsistent. In this paper I distinguish contradictions from other inconsistencies, and I show that several different logics are, in an important sense, “paraconsistent” in virtue of being inconsistency tolerant without thereby being contradiction tolerant. For example, even though no inconsistencies are tolerated by intuitionistic propositional logic, some inconsistencies are tolerated by intuitionistic predicate logic. In this way, intuitionistic predicate logic is, in a mild sense, paraconsistent. So too are orthologic and quantum propositional logic and other formal systems. Given this fact, a widespread view that traditional paraconsistent logics are especially repugnant because they countenance inconsistencies is undercut. Many well-understood nonclassical logics countenance inconsistencies as well.

(This paper was published in 2004, despite the apparent date of 2002 in the citation. The tale is told in more detail here.)