The Universe of Approximations

Abstract The idea of approximate entailment has been in [13] as a way of modeling the reasoning of an agent with limited resources. They proposed a system in which a family of logics, parameterized by a set of propositional letters, approximates classical logic as the size of the set increases. In this paper, we take the idea further, extending two of their systems to deal with full propositional logic, giving them semantics and sound and complete proof methods based on tableaux. We then present a more general system of which the two previous systems are particular cases and show how it can be used to formalize heuristics used in theorem proving.