A Paraconsistentist Approach to Chisholm's Paradox

• Main Authors: Marcelo Esteban Coniglio, Newton Marques Peron
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2009-12-01
• Series: Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology
• Subjects: Paraconsistent logic; deontic logic; deontic paradoxes; chisholm’s paradox; moral dilemmas; logics of formal inconsistency
• Online Access: http://www.periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/principia/article/view/19676/18037

The Logics of Deontic (In)Consistency (LDI’s) can be considered as the deontic counterpart of the paraconsistent logics known as Logics of Formal (In)Consistency. This paper introduces and studies new LDI’s and other paraconsistent deontic logics with different properties: systems tolerant to contradictory obligations; systems in which contradictory obligations trivialize; and a bimodal paraconsistent deontic logic combining the features of previous systems. These logics are used to analyze the well-known Chisholm’s paradox, taking profit of the fact that, besides contradictory obligations do not trivialize in LDI’s, several logical dependencies of classical logic are blocked in the context of LDI’s, allowing to dissolve the paradox.