2

The text I'm reading distinguishes logical necessity, logical consequence, logical truth, and tautology from one another; however it doesn't make their distinctions especially perspicuous.

As far as I interpreted it,

  • Logical consequence: truth of the antecedent or premises guarantees the truth of the consequent or conclusions.
  • Logical truth: Any statement that must be valuated true, even if the set of premises is the empty set. (3=3, p v ~p, etc)
  • Tautology: Any statement that must be valuated true, but only when the statement is stated. (as opposed to logical truths)
  • Logical necessity: for any set of statements containing the logically necessary statement in question, the logically necessary statement can be evaluated as true under at least one valuation.
1
  • 2
    You can see in SEP the following entries : Logical Truth and Logical Consequence. Tautology is a technical term (in propositional logic) without "philosophical" connotations. Logical consequence is a technical term with "philosophical" connotations. Logical truth may be equated with validity, and so is a technical term, but has some deep aspects and implications. Logical necessity involves modal logic. Commented Mar 21, 2014 at 9:38

1 Answer 1

4

Tautologies are logical truths in the context of propositional logic:

φ is a tautology       =def   φ is assigned ⊤ by all rows of the truth-table for φ.

Logical truths are something more general, and can be defined as follows:

φ is a logical truth   =def   a true interpretation of the logical constants occurring in φ makes φ true.

Logical consequence is similar to that:

φ is a logical consequence of ψ   =def   every true interpretation of ψ makes φ true.

Logical necessity is a modal notion, and can be defined using state-descriptions:

φ is logically necessary   =def   φ is true in all state-descriptions.

All of these definitions are inspired by Carnap, but may differ from his actual definitions.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .