logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premis ...

and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a

proposition In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, "meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...

truth Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs ...

, which in classical logic has only two possible values (''

true True most commonly refers to truth, the state of being in congruence with fact or reality. True may also refer to: Places * True, West Virginia, an unincorporated community in the United States * True, Wisconsin, a town in the United States * ...

'' or ''

false False or falsehood may refer to: * False (logic), the negation of truth in classical logic *Lie or falsehood, a type of deception in the form of an untruthful statement * false (Unix), a Unix command * ''False'' (album), a 1992 album by Gorefest * ...

'').

Computing

In some programming languages, any expression can be evaluated in a context that expects a

Boolean data type In computer science, the Boolean (sometimes shortened to Bool) is a data type that has one of two possible values (usually denoted ''true'' and ''false'') which is intended to represent the two truth values of logic and Boolean algebra. It is named ...

. Typically (though this varies by programming language) expressions like the number

zero 0 (zero) is a number representing an empty quantity. In place-value notation such as the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, 0 also serves as a placeholder numerical digit, which works by multiplying digits to the left of 0 by the radix, usu ...

, the

empty string In formal language theory, the empty string, or empty word, is the unique string of length zero. Formal theory Formally, a string is a finite, ordered sequence of characters such as letters, digits or spaces. The empty string is the special cas ...

, empty lists, and null evaluate to false, and strings with content (like "abc"), other numbers, and objects evaluate to true. Sometimes these classes of expressions are called "truthy" and "falsy" / "false".

Classical logic

In classical logic, with its intended semantics, the truth values are ''

'' (denoted by ''1'' or the

verum The tee (⊤, \top in LaTeX) also called down tack (as opposed to the up tack) or verum is a symbol used to represent: * The top element in lattice theory. * The truth value of being true in logic, or a sentence (e.g., formula in propositional ...

⊤), and '' untrue'' or ''

'' (denoted by ''0'' or the

falsum The up tack or falsum (⊥, \bot in LaTeX, U+22A5 in Unicode) is a constant symbol used to represent: * The truth value 'false', or a logical constant denoting a proposition in logic that is always false (often called "falsum" or "absurdum"). ...

⊥); that is, classical logic is a

two-valued logic In logic, the semantic principle (or law) of bivalence states that every declarative sentence expressing a proposition (of a theory under inspection) has exactly one truth value, either true or false. A logic satisfying this principle is called ...

. This set of two values is also called the

Boolean domain In mathematics and abstract algebra, a Boolean domain is a set consisting of exactly two elements whose interpretations include ''false'' and ''true''. In logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science, a Boolean domain is usually written ...

. Corresponding semantics of

logical connective In logic, a logical connective (also called a logical operator, sentential connective, or sentential operator) is a logical constant. They can be used to connect logical formulas. For instance in the syntax of propositional logic, the binary ...

s are

truth function In logic, a truth function is a function that accepts truth values as input and produces a unique truth value as output. In other words: The input and output of a truth function are all truth values; a truth function will always output exactly on ...

s, whose values are expressed in the form of

truth table A truth table is a mathematical table used in logic—specifically in connection with Boolean algebra (logic), Boolean algebra, boolean functions, and propositional calculus—which sets out the functional values of logical expression (mathematics) ...

Logical biconditional In logic and mathematics, the logical biconditional, sometimes known as the material biconditional, is the logical connective (\leftrightarrow) used to conjoin two statements and to form the statement " if and only if ", where is known as t ...

becomes the equality binary relation, and

negation In logic, negation, also called the logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P or \overline. It is interpreted intuitively as being true when P is false, and fals ...

becomes a bijection which permutes true and false. Conjunction and disjunction are

dual Dual or Duals may refer to: Paired/two things * Dual (mathematics), a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another ** Dual (category theory), a formalization of mathematical duality *** see more cases in :Duality theories * Dual (grammatical ...

with respect to negation, which is expressed by

De Morgan's laws In propositional logic and Boolean algebra, De Morgan's laws, also known as De Morgan's theorem, are a pair of transformation rules that are both valid rules of inference. They are named after Augustus De Morgan, a 19th-century British mathem ...

: : ¬( : ¬(

Propositional variable In mathematical logic, a propositional variable (also called a sentential variable or sentential letter) is an input variable (that can either be true or false) of a truth function. Propositional variables are the basic building-blocks of propos ...

s become variables in the Boolean domain. Assigning values for propositional variables is referred to as valuation.

Intuitionistic and constructive logic

intuitionistic logic Intuitionistic logic, sometimes more generally called constructive logic, refers to systems of symbolic logic that differ from the systems used for classical logic by more closely mirroring the notion of constructive proof. In particular, system ...

, and more generally,

constructive mathematics In the philosophy of mathematics, constructivism asserts that it is necessary to find (or "construct") a specific example of a mathematical object in order to prove that an example exists. Contrastingly, in classical mathematics, one can prove t ...

, statements are assigned a truth value only if they can be given a constructive proof. It starts with a set of axioms, and a statement is true if one can build a proof of the statement from those axioms. A statement is false if one can deduce a contradiction from it. This leaves open the possibility of statements that have not yet been assigned a truth value. Unproven statements in intuitionistic logic are not given an intermediate truth value (as is sometimes mistakenly asserted). Indeed, one can prove that they have no third truth value, a result dating back to Glivenko in 1928.Proof that intuitionistic logic has no third truth value, Glivenko 1928
/ref> Instead, statements simply remain of unknown truth value, until they are either proven or disproven. There are various ways of interpreting intuitionistic logic, including the

Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation In mathematical logic, the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation, or BHK interpretation, of intuitionistic logic was proposed by L. E. J. Brouwer and Arend Heyting, and independently by Andrey Kolmogorov. It is also sometimes called the re ...

. See also .

Multi-valued logic

Multi-valued logics (such as

fuzzy logic Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth value of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and complet ...

and

relevance logic Relevance logic, also called relevant logic, is a kind of non- classical logic requiring the antecedent and consequent of implications to be relevantly related. They may be viewed as a family of substructural or modal logics. It is generally, but ...

) allow for more than two truth values, possibly containing some internal structure. For example, on the

unit interval In mathematics, the unit interval is the closed interval , that is, the set of all real numbers that are greater than or equal to 0 and less than or equal to 1. It is often denoted ' (capital letter ). In addition to its role in real analys ...

such structure is a

total order In mathematics, a total or linear order is a partial order in which any two elements are comparable. That is, a total order is a binary relation \leq on some set X, which satisfies the following for all a, b and c in X: # a \leq a ( reflexiv ...

; this may be expressed as the existence of various degrees of truth.

Algebraic semantics

Not all

logical system A formal system is an abstract structure used for inferring theorems from axioms according to a set of rules. These rules, which are used for carrying out the inference of theorems from axioms, are the logical calculus of the formal system. A for ...

s are truth-valuational in the sense that logical connectives may be interpreted as truth functions. For example,

lacks a complete set of truth values because its semantics, the

, is specified in terms of provability conditions, and not directly in terms of the necessary truth of formulae. But even non-truth-valuational logics can associate values with logical formulae, as is done in algebraic semantics. The algebraic semantics of intuitionistic logic is given in terms of

Heyting algebra In mathematics, a Heyting algebra (also known as pseudo-Boolean algebra) is a bounded lattice (with join and meet operations written ∨ and ∧ and with least element 0 and greatest element 1) equipped with a binary operation ''a'' → ''b'' of '' ...

s, compared to

Boolean algebra In mathematics and mathematical logic, Boolean algebra is a branch of algebra. It differs from elementary algebra in two ways. First, the values of the variables are the truth values ''true'' and ''false'', usually denoted 1 and 0, whereas ...

semantics of classical propositional calculus.

In other theories

Intuitionistic type theory Intuitionistic type theory (also known as constructive type theory, or Martin-Löf type theory) is a type theory and an alternative foundation of mathematics. Intuitionistic type theory was created by Per Martin-Löf, a Swedish mathematician and p ...

uses

types Type may refer to: Science and technology Computing * Typing, producing text via a keyboard, typewriter, etc. * Data type, collection of values used for computations. * File type * TYPE (DOS command), a command to display contents of a file. * Ty ...

in the place of truth values.

Topos In mathematics, a topos (, ; plural topoi or , or toposes) is a category that behaves like the category of sheaves of sets on a topological space (or more generally: on a site). Topoi behave much like the category of sets and possess a notio ...

theory uses truth values in a special sense: the truth values of a topos are the global elements of the subobject classifier. Having truth values in this sense does not make a logic truth valuational.

References

External links

* {{Logical truth Concepts in logic Propositions Value Value (ethics) Epistemology