module: Connexions m10774
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partIVc: Inference rules for first-order logic
Version 2.11: 2004/05/14 14:25:13.514 GMT-5
John Greiner Ian Barland
This work is produced by The Connexions Project and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License
Abstract How to reason with first-order formulas.
partIVc: Inference rules for first-order logic
1 Inference with quantifiers
Proving first-order sentences with inference rules is not substantially different than for propositional ones. We simply need to introduce new inference rules for dealing with the new syntactic forms relations and quantifiers. To understand relations, we turn to their interpretation1 . An interpretation provides axioms that we can use, just like those in propositional logic. For example, we have the axioms for WaterWorld as modeled in first-order logic2 . What is the most natural way to prove an existential sentence, like there exists a prime number greater than 5? That's easy, you just mention such a number, like 11, and show that it is indeed prime and greater than 5. In other words, to prove x. , we'll choose some witness, and show that holds, if we use that witness in the place of x. We use the notation [x/t] to mean such a substitution of a term t for every occurrence of variable x within aside: Technically, we have to be careful. If there are multiple quantifiers binding x, we only want to rename the appropriate ones. Also, we don't want any free variable occurrences in t to be captured by a bound variable in . For simplicity, we'll continue to assume that the bound variables of are -renamed, so that they are distinctly named from each other and from the variables in t. How do you find a witness? That's the difficult part. You, the person creating the proof, must grab a suitable example out of thin air, based on your knowledge of what you want to prove about it. In our previous example, we used our knowledge about prime numbers and about the greater-than relation to pick a witness that would work. In essence, we figured
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0 1 http://cnx.rice.edu/content/m10726/latest/ 2 http://cnx.rice.edu/content/new0/latest/
http://cnx.rice.edu/content/m10774/latest/
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out what facts needed to be true about the witness for the formula to hold, and used that to guide our choice of witness. But, this can easily be more difficult, as when proving that there exists a prime greater than 6971 of the form 4x - 1. aside: Another is 796751. Another approach is trial-and-error. Pick a value as the witness, and attempt to continue with the proof. If you succeed, you're done. If not, pick another candidate. Can we extend that idea to proving a universal sentence? One witness is certainly not enough. We'd need to work with lots of witnesses, in fact, every single member of our domain. That's not very practical, especially with infinitely large domains. We need to show that no matter what domain element you choose, the formula holds. If we choose an arbitrary member of the domain, and show that the sentence holds for it, that is sufficient. But, what do we mean by "arbitrary"? In short, it means that we have no control over what element is picked, or equivalently, that the proof must hold regardless of what element is picked. More precisely, a variable is arbitrary unless: A variable is not arbitrary if it is free in a premise. A variable is not arbitrary if it is at any time involved in a Elim step either as the introduced witness c, or anywhere else in the formula. The usual way to introduce arbitrary variables is during Elim (w/o later using it in Elim). The formal inference rule for introduction of universal quantification will use these cases as restrictions. 1.1 Formal inference rules and proofs As with equivalences, we will use our original proposititional inference rules3 and (.ps)4 add new ones for reasoning about quantified formulas5 (.pdf)6 (.ps)7 . Recall the syllogisms from a previous lecture. The general form of a syllogism is 1. x. (P (x) Q (x)) [major premise] 2. P (c) [minor premise] 3. Q (c) [conclusion] In our system, we don't have syllogism as a separate rule of inference, but it's easy to see how to translate any syllogism into our system: (for specific relations P and Q, and a specific constant c). 1 2 3 4 x. (P (x) Q (x)) P (c) (P (c) Q (c)) Q (c) premise premise Elim, by line 1, with x=c Elim, by lines 2,3, with =P c, and =Qc
Eliminating a quantifier via Elim and Elim is often merely an intermediate step, where the quantifier will be reintroduced later. This moves the quantification from being explicit
3 http://cnx.rice.edu/content/m10529/latest/ 4 http://www.teachLogic.org/Base/Printables/inference-rules.ps 5 http://cnx.rice.edu/content/m11046/latest/ 6 http://www.teachLogic.org/Base/Printables/first-order-inference-rules.pdf 7 http://www.teachLogic.org/Base/Printables/first-order-inference-rules.ps
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to implicit, so that we can use other inference rules on the body of the formula. When this is done, it is very important to pay attention to the restrictions on Intro, so that we don't accidentally "prove" anything too strong. Example 1: , x, ., , y, ., similar). y.x. , for the particular case of = R (x, y) (other cases all
1 2 3 4 5
x.y.R (x, y) y.R (p, y) R (p, q) x.R (x, q) y.x.R (x, y)
premise Elim, by line 1 Elim, by line 2 Intro, by line 3 Intro, by line 4
Note that the other direction doesn't hold. Also note, we cannot instead conclude in line 4 that x.R (x, q) by Intro, since variable p was introduced by Elim in line 2. The Intro principle is actually very familiar. For instance, after having shown (a b) ( a b ) , we then claimed this was really true for arbitrary propositions instead of just a,b. (We actually went a bit further, generalizing individual propositions to entire (arbitrary) WFFs ,. This could only be done because in any particular interpretation, a formula will either be true or false, so replacing it by a proposition still preserves the important part of the proof-of-equivalence.) The Intro is also used in many informal proofs. C...