Classical logic identifies a class of formal logics that have been most intensively studied and most widely used. The class is sometimes called standard logic as well. They are characterised by a number of properties:
- Law of the excluded middle and Double negative elimination;
- Law of noncontradiction, and the principle of explosion;
- Monotonicity of entailment and Idempotency of entailment;
- Commutativity of conjunction;
- De Morgan duality: every logical operator is dual to another;
While not entailed by the preceding conditions, contemporary discussions of classical logic normally only include propositional and first-order logics.
The intended semantics of classical logic is bivalent. With the advent of algebraic logic it became apparent however that classical propositional calculus admits other semantics. In Boolean-valued semantics (for classical propositional logic), the truth values are the elements of an arbitrary Boolean algebra; "true" corresponds to the maximal element of the algebra, and "false" corresponds to the minimal element. Intermediate elements of the algebra correspond to truth values other than "true" and "false". The principle of bivalence holds only when the Boolean algebra is taken to be the two-element algebra, which has no intermediate elements.
Read more about Classical Logic: Examples of Classical Logics, Non-classical Logics
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