Propositions and Rule Base

Philosophical reasoning and especially logical inferences need propositions, which refer to relational content with meaning for further rational thinking possibilities and they are declarative in the forms of IF-THEN statement implications. Each logical statement is a proposition with its antecedent and consequent parts that imply IF (antecedent) THEN (consequent) sort of relationships. 

The relational content leads one to ponder whether it is true or false or partially true or false. No need to say that the content of any proposition is subject to philosophical debate for possibly new idea generations, and hence, the overall meaning of a proposition becomes clearer after each discussion. Controversy is an imbedded property that may exist in any proposition with imprecise and vague information content. Only a set of assumptions cuts the way of controversy, because any proposition coupled with assumptions is regarded as absolute truth, which is never the case especially in scientific and engineering disciplines. The words statement and sentence are also used in the same sense of proposition subject to interpretations. Belief, desire, sense, etc. based configurations also lead to propositions, which are for exposed critical view for mote general acceptance by folks. Hence, they can be interpreted as mental content of attitudes. 

Propositions have also formal logic as objects of a formal language. The form of a proposition depends on the type of logic. The elements of such language are either variables (cause-reason-input or effect-result-output), predictive relationships, mathematical symbols and operators, functions, quantifiers and constants. One can propose his/her view of point about an event and then s/he must defend it against the critical debates of others. 

It may not be possible to represent the behavioral performance of some phenomenon with a single proposition, and a set of partially mutually inclusive propositions may suffice for the presentation at an acceptance level. The collection of descriptive propositions is referred to as the rule base, because their simultaneous considerations explain the whole phenomenal behavior. 

Any rule base should have IF-THEN implications in its structure and they provide the generation pattern of the phenomenon leading to inference engine search for the patterns embedded in the rules in such a manner that they match the overall qualitative and quantitative validities. In a rule base IF means when the condition is true, THEN means take action. In many cases, there is also another word as ELSE after IF-THEN, which means that when the condition (rule) is not true take another action (rule). In the logical connectives ELSE corresponds to OR , and hence to ORing action. Some of the examples are as follows. 

---