Contraposition
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Transformation rules
Propositional calculus
Rules of inference (List)
Implication introduction / elimination
(modus ponens)
Biconditional introduction / elimination
Conjunction introduction / elimination
Disjunction introduction / elimination
Disjunctive / hypothetical syllogism
Constructive / destructive dilemma
Absorption / modus tollens / modus
ponendo tollens
Modus non excipiens
Negation introduction
Rules of replacement
Associativity
Commutativity
Distributivity
Double negation
De Morgan's laws
Transposition
Material implication
Exportation
Tautology
Predicate logic
Rules of inference
Universal generalization / instantiation
Existential generalization / instantiation
v
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In logic and mathematics, contraposition, or transposition, refers to the inference of going
from a conditional statement into its logically equivalent contrapositive, and an associated
proof method known as § Proof by contrapositive. The contrapositive of a statement has
its antecedent and consequent negated and swapped.
Conditional statement . In formulas: the contrapositive of is .[1]
If P, Then Q. — If not Q, Then not P. "If it is raining, then I wear my coat." — "If I don't wear
my coat, then it isn't raining."
The law of contraposition says that a conditional statement is true if, and only if, its
contrapositive is true.[2]
Contraposition () can be compared with three other operations:
Inversion (the inverse),
"If it is not raining, then I don't wear my coat." Unlike the contrapositive, the inverse's truth
value is not at all dependent on whether or not the original proposition was true, as
evidenced here.
Conversion (the converse),
"If I wear my coat, then it is raining." The converse is actually the contrapositive of the
inverse, and so always has the same truth value as the inverse (which as stated earlier does
not always share the same truth value as that of the original proposition).
Negation (the logical complement),
"It is not the case that if it is raining then I wear my coat.", or equivalently, "Sometimes,
when it is raining, I don't wear my coat." If the negation is true, then the original proposition
(and by extension the contrapositive) is false.
Note that if is true and one is given that is false (i.e., ), then it can logically be concluded
that must be also false (i.e., ). This is often called the law of contrapositive, or the modus
tollens rule of inference.[3]
Intuitive explanation
In the Euler diagram shown, if something is in A, it must be in B as well. So we can interpret
"all of A is in B" as:
It is also clear that anything that is not within B (the blue region) cannot be within A, either.
This statement, which can be expressed as:
is the contrapositive of the above statement. Therefore, one can say that
In practice, this equivalence can be used to make proving a statement easier. For example, if
one wishes to prove that every girl in the United States (A) has brown hair (B), one can
either try to directly prove by checking that all girls in the United States do indeed have
brown hair, or try to prove by checking that all girls without brown hair are indeed all
outside the US. In particular, if one were to find at least one girl without brown hair within
the US, then one would have disproved , and equivalently .
In general, for any statement where A implies B, not B always implies not A. As a result,
proving or disproving either one of these statements automatically proves or disproves the
other, as they are logically equivalent to each other.
Formal definition
A proposition Q is implicated by a proposition P when the following relationship holds:
This states that, "if , then ", or, "if Socrates is a man, then Socrates is human." In a
conditional such as this, is the antecedent, and is the consequent. One statement is
the contrapositive of the other only when its antecedent is the negated consequent of the
other, and vice versa. Thus a contrapositive generally takes the form of:
That is, "If not-, then not-", or, more clearly, "If is not the case, then P is not the case." Using
our example, this is rendered as "If Socrates is not human, then Socrates is not a man." This
statement is said to be contraposed to the original and is logically equivalent to it. Due to
their logical equivalence, stating one effectively states the other; when one is true, the other
is also true, and when one is false, the other is also false.
Strictly speaking, a contraposition can only exist in two simple conditionals. However, a
contraposition may also exist in two complex, universal conditionals, if they are similar.
Thus, , or "All s are s," is contraposed to , or "All non-s are non-s."[4]
Sequent notation
The transposition rule may be expressed as a sequent:
where is a metalogical symbol meaning that is a syntactic consequence of in some logical
system; or as a rule of inference:
where the rule is that wherever an instance of "" appears on a line of a proof, it can be
replaced with ""; or as the statement of a truth-functional tautology or theorem of
propositional logic. The principle was stated as a theorem of propositional logic
by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica as
where and are propositions expressed in some formal system.
Proofs