Complementarity and Paraconsistency

Abstract

Bohr's Principle of Complementarity is controversial and there has been much dispute over its precise meaning. Here, without trying to provide a detailed exegesis of Bohr's ideas, we take a very plausible interpretation of what may be understood by a theory which encompasses complementarity in a definite sense, which we term C-theories. The underlying logic of such theories is a kind of logic which has been termed ‘paraclassical’, obtained from classical logic by a suitable modification of the notion of deduction. Roughly speaking, C-theories are non-trivial theories which may have ‘physically’ incompatible theorems (and, in particular, contradictory theorems). So, their underlying logic is a kind of paraconsistent logic.