Journal of Philosophical Logic

, Volume 44, Issue 5, pp 573–592 | Cite as

Getting the Most Out of Inconsistency

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Abstract

In this paper we look at two classic methods of deriving consequences from inconsistent premises: Rescher-Manor and Schotch-Jennings. The overall goal of the project is to confine the method of drawing consequences from inconsistent sets to those that do not require reference to any information outside of very general facts about the set of premises. Methods in belief revision often require imposing assumptions on premises, e.g., which are the important premises, how the premises relate in non-logical ways. Such assumptions enable one to select a reasonable collection of formulas from all the formulas of the language (the set of consequences of an inconsistent set). Basic versions of the classic methods only use logical relations between the premises. We compare and criticize each of the classic views with an eye to combining the views to get the most out of inconsistent premises. We do this in a way that will respect the theoretical grounding of each view while meeting our other restrictions.

Keywords

Paraconsistency Consequence relations Rescher-Manor Schotch-Jennings 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The author would like the thank the Killam Trusts at Dalhousie University for funding this research, and for an anonymous referee for this journal for comments and suggestions.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Dalhousie UniversityHalifaxCanada

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