Alan Ross Anderson - Deontic Logic

Deontic Logic

Anderson advocated the view that sentences of the form "It ought to be (the case) that A" should be interpreted logically as:

• Not-A entails v,

where v means something like a norm has been violated. He developed systems of deontic relevance logic containing a special constant v (notation varies) for this purpose. Such systems have sometimes been characterized as "reductions" of deontic logic to alethic modal logic. This is misleading at best, however, since alethic modal logics generally do not contain anything like Anderson's special v constant.