nLab
de Morgan duality

In logic, de Morgan duality is a duality between intuitionistic logic and paraconsistent logic. In classical logic and linear logic, it is a self-duality mediated by negation. Although it goes back to Aristotle (at least), its discovery is generally attributed to Augustus de Morgan.

More explicitly, this is the duality between logical constants and operators as shown in the table below:

Intuitionistic operatorParaconsistent operator
(without)
+ (exclusive or)
¬ (p)

Note that the first two operators in each column exist in both intuitionistic and paraconsistent propositional logic and the last two in each column exist in both forms of predicate logic and modal logic? (respectively), but they are still dual as shown. All of these exist in classical logic (although some of the paraconsistent operators are not widely used), and the two forms of negation are the same there.

In linear logic, this extends to a duality between conjunctive and disjunctive operators:

Conjunctive operatorDisjunctive operator
0
1
&
!?

As with classical negation, linear negation is self dual.

The first two rows of the intuitionistic/paraconsistent/classical duality generalise to arbitrary lattices, including subobject lattices in coherent categories, and from there to the duality between limits and colimits in category theory:

LimitColimit
topbottom
meetjoin
intersectionunion
terminal objectinitial object

So in a way, all duality in category theory is a generalisation of de Morgan duality.