Łukasiewicz logic
In mathematics and philosophy, Łukasiewicz logic (/ˌluːkəˈʃɛvɪtʃ/ LOO-kə-SHEV-itch, Polish: [wukaˈɕɛvitʂ]) is a non-classical, many-valued logic. It was originally defined in the early 20th century by Jan Łukasiewicz as a three-valued modal logic; it was later generalized to n-valued (for all finite n) as well as infinitely-many-valued (ℵ0-valued) variants, both propositional and first order. The ℵ0-valued version was published in 1930 by Łukasiewicz and Alfred Tarski; consequently it is sometimes called the Łukasiewicz–Tarski logic. It belongs to the classes of t-norm fuzzy logics and substructural logics.
Łukasiewicz logic was motivated by Aristotle's suggestion that bivalent logic was not applicable to future contingents, e.g. the statement "There will be a sea battle tomorrow". In other words, statements about the future were neither true nor false, but an intermediate value could be assigned to them, to represent their possibility of becoming true in the future.
This article presents the Łukasiewicz(–Tarski) logic in its full generality, i.e. as an infinite-valued logic. For an elementary introduction to the three-valued instantiation Ł3, see three-valued logic.