The Relevance Logic Programme: Failed or Just Stalled?

Abstract

Since its heyday in the 1960s–1980s, the relevance logic programme has lost much of its momentum. The underlying idea has indeed been transposed into various kinds of formal system, but they lack the intuitive transparency that was once hoped for. Today, relevance logic is not part of the mainstream of the broader discipline of logic, nor has it been widely taken up by computer scientists, mathematicians or philosophers. Has the programme failed, or has it merely stalled? We suggest the latter, proposing a natural way of generating a relevance logic by means of suitably controlled semantic decomposition trees.