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Assignment F

Independence results like this are often established by semantics.

Common Mistakes:

  • Few students forgot to show that MP preserves ‘truths’, thus they didn’t state that all theorems are ‘true’.
  • Checking all possible valuations of the axiom schemata is crucial in the proof of independence.

Challenge: Prove that Peirce’s Law ABAAA\supset B\supset A\supset A cannot be deduced by using only axiom schemata A.BAA\supset .B\supset A and [A.BC].AB.AC[A\supset .B\supset C]\supset .A\supset B\supset .A\supset C.

Hint: design a three-valued truth assignment and show that any consequence deduced from the axioms will always take value T and Peirce’s Law won’t. You may consider the following table and try to figure out what values x, y and z should take respectively.

AABBABA\supset B
TTT
TMM
TFF
MTx
MMy
MFz
FTT
FMT
FFT