Entailment and relevance1

Abstract

Those who object to the identification of strict implication and entail-ment speak in such a way that for A to entail B, A must be relevant to B. This view of entailment agrees not only with that of the naive student of logic (who tends to think the phrase paradoxes of “implication” more accurate than “paradoxes” of implication), but also with that expressed in the initial chapters of many textbooks in logic under the heading “Fallacies of Relevance.”2In regard to formal theories proposed as explications of the notion of entailment, it becomes important to have at our disposal some formal account of the demand for relevance as between antecedent and consequent of an entailment.