| Description: Axiom Simp. Axiom
A1 of [Margaris] p. 49. One of the 3 axioms
of
propositional calculus. The 3 axioms are also given as Definition 2.1
of [Hamilton] p. 28. This axiom is
called Simp or "the principle of
simplification" in Principia Mathematica (Theorem *2.02 of
[WhiteheadRussell] p. 100)
because "it enables us to pass from the joint
assertion of φ and ψ to the assertion of φ simply."
Propositional calculus (axioms ax-1 3 through ax-3 5 and
rule ax-mp 6)
can be thought of as asserting formulas that are universally
"true" when
their variables are replaced by any combination of "true" and
"false".
Propositional calculus was first formalized by Frege in 1879, using as
his axioms (in addition to rule ax-mp 6) the wffs ax-1 3, ax-2 4,
pm2.04 31, con3 86, nega 78,
and negb 79. Around 1930, Lukasiewicz
simplified the system by eliminating the third (which follows from the
first two, as you can see by looking at the proof of pm2.04 31) and
replacing the last three with our ax-3 5. (Thanks to Ted Ulrich
for this information.)
The theorems of propositional calculus are also called tautologies.
Tautologies can be proved very simply using truth tables, based on the
true/false interpretation of propositional calculus. This is called the
semantic approach. Our approach is called the syntactic
approach,
in which everything is derived from axioms. A metatheorem called the
Completeness Theorem for Propositional Calculus shows that the two
approaches are equivalent and even provides an algorithm for
automatically generating syntactic proofs from a truth table. Those
proofs, however, tend to be long, and the much shorter proofs that we
show here were found manually. |