Recovering Quantum Logic within an Extended Classical Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces a procedure to recover classical and nonclassical logical structures from physical theories using classical languages, linking logic with physical notions of verifiability and providing a physical interpretation for quantum logic.

Contribution

It presents a novel method to derive concrete logics from physical theories, unifying classical and quantum logics within a common framework and supporting the idea of logical pluralism.

Findings

Recovered classical logic from classical mechanics

Derived quantum logic with a physical interpretation

Supported coexistence of multiple nonclassical logics

Abstract

We present a procedure which allows us to recover classical and nonclassical logical structures as \emph{concrete logics} associated with physical theories expressed by means of classical languages. This procedure consists in choosing, for a given theory $\mathcal T$ and classical language $\mathcal L$ expressing $\mathcal T$, an observative sublanguage $L$ of $\mathcal L$ with a notion of truth as correspondence, introducing in $L$ a derived and theory-dependent notion of \emph{C-truth} (\emph{true with certainty}), defining a \emph{physical preorder} induced by C-truth, and finally selecting a set of sentences that are \emph{verifiable} (or \emph{testable}) according to $\mathcal T$, on which a \emph{weak complementation} is induced by $\mathcal T$. The triple consisting of the set of verifiable sentences, physical order and weak complementation is then the desired concrete logic. By applying our procedure we recover a classical logic as the concrete logic associated with classical mechanics and standard quantum logic as the concrete logic associated with quantum mechanics. We also show that our alternative view of standard quantum logic, which can be constructed in a purely formal way, can be provided with a physical meaning by adopting a recent interpretation of quantum mechanics that reinterprets quantum probabilities as conditional on detection rather than absolute. Our results then show that some nonstandard logics can be obtained as mathematical structures formalizing the properties of different notions of verifiability in different physical theories. More generally, they strongly support the idea that many nonclassical logics can coexist without conflicting with classical logic (\emph{global pluralism}), for they formalize metalinguistic notions that do not coincide with the notion of truth (described by Tarski's truth theory).