New approach to probability Logic with complete
axiomatization
Zoran Markovic
Abstract:
The problem of reasoning about statements whose truth is
uncertain has been open since the time of Boole. In 20th century logical
foundations of probability theory were studied by Carnap, Reichenbach,
Keisler many other authors. Since the mid 80's the problem was studied
by people from Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, starting
with Nilsson, who were looking for tools to deal with uncertain
knowledge. Many systems have been designed but some of the problems
persist. One of these is the problem of providing a complete
axiomatization. In the approach to be presented (which is due to
M.Raskovic, Z.Ognjanovic and Z.Markovic) this problem is solved by
introducing an infinitary rule of inference. Although this may seem to
be a serious disadvantage for possible applications, it is proved that
the system is decidable and that the decision problem is tractable.
Another problem is that of entailment. Namely, classical (material)
implication behaves sometimes paradoxically in the context of
probability so it cannot serve to model the notion of "follows from"
when applied to statements with different probability of truth. In our
approach the problem is dealt with in two ways. One is to use the
conditional probabilities, which is the standard approach, but here it
has a complete axiomatization. Another way is to start with
intuitionistic propositional calculus, which is very nonstandard but
provides a much better behaved implication. Again the system is
decidable, with tractable decision problem.