"Independence-friendly existential graphs"

Abstract

Last century was predominantly the era of symbolic logic. Earlier, and also relatively recently, iconic versions of logic were and have been suggested. Independence-friendly (IF) first-order logic is aimed at representing different dependencies and independencies between quantified variables. Accordingly, it differentiates between "priority" and "binding" scopes of quantifiers. What is the corresponding iconic logic of these and other IF notions? I will consider C. S. Peirce's diagrammatic logic of Existential Graphs -- a precursor to Conceptual Graphs widespread in computer science -- and the possibility that independence is captured by adding dimensions to the sheets of assertions.