Frontiers of Conditional Logic

Conditional logics were originally developed for the purpose of modeling intuitively correct modes of reasoning involving conditional—especially counterfactual—expressions in natural language. While the debate over the logic of conditionals is as old as propositional logic, it was the development of worlds semantics for modal logic in the past century that catalyzed the rapid maturation of the field. Moreover, like modal logic, conditional logic has subsequently found a wide array of uses, from the traditional (e.g. counterfactuals) to the exotic (e.g. conditional obligation). Despite the close connections between conditional and modal logic, both the technical development and philosophical exploitation of the latter has outstripped that of the former, with the result that noticeable lacunae exist in the literature on conditional logic. My dissertation addresses a number of these underdeveloped frontiers, producing new technical insights and philosophical applications. I contribute to the solution of a problem posed by Priest of finding sound and complete labeled tableaux for systems of conditional logic from Lewis\u27 V-family. To develop these tableaux, I draw on previous work on labeled tableaux for modal and conditional logic; errors and shortcomings in recent work on this problem are identified and corrected. While modal logic has by now been thoroughly studied in non-classical contexts, e.g. intuitionistic and relevant logic, the literature on conditional logic is still overwhelmingly classical. Another contribution of my dissertation is a thorough analysis of intuitionistic conditional logic, in which I utilize both algebraic and worlds semantics, and investigate how several novel embedding results might shed light on the philosophical interpretation of both intuitionistic logic and conditional logic extensions thereof. My dissertation examines deontic and connexive conditional logic as well as the underappreciated history of connexive notions in the analysis of conditional obligation. The possibility of interpreting deontic modal logics in such systems (via embedding results) serves as an important theoretical guide. A philosophically motivated proscription on impossible obligations is shown to correspond to, and justify, certain (weak) connexive theses. Finally, I contribute to the intensifying debate over counterpossibles, counterfactuals with impossible antecedents, and take—in contrast to Lewis and Williamson—a non-vacuous line. Thus, in my view, a counterpossible like If there had been a counterexample to the law of the excluded middle, Brouwer would not have been vindicated is false, not (vacuously) true, although it has an impossible antecedent. I exploit impossible (non-normal) worlds—originally developed to model non-normal modal logics—to provide non-vacuous semantics for counterpossibles. I buttress the case for non-vacuous semantics by making recourse to both novel technical results and theoretical considerations

Proof-theoretic Semantics for Intuitionistic Multiplicative Linear Logic

This work is the first exploration of proof-theoretic semantics for a substructural logic. It focuses on the base-extension semantics (B-eS) for intuitionistic multiplicative linear logic (IMLL). The starting point is a review of Sandqvist’s B-eS for intuitionistic propositional logic (IPL), for which we propose an alternative treatment of conjunction that takes the form of the generalized elimination rule for the connective. The resulting semantics is shown to be sound and complete. This motivates our main contribution, a B-eS for IMLL , in which the definitions of the logical constants all take the form of their elimination rule and for which soundness and completeness are established

Dualities in modal logic

Categorical dualities are an important tool in the study of (modal) logics. They offer conceptual understanding and enable the transfer of results between the different semantics of a logic. As such, they play a central role in the proofs of completeness theorems, Sahlqvist theorems and Goldblatt-Thomason theorems. A common way to obtain dualities is by extending existing ones. For example, Jonsson-Tarski duality is an extension of Stone duality. A convenient formalism to carry out such extensions is given by the dual categorical notions of algebras and coalgebras. Intuitively, these allow one to isolate the new part of a duality from the existing part. In this thesis we will derive both existing and new dualities via this route, and we show how to use the dualities to investigate logics. However, not all (modal logical) paradigms fit the (co)algebraic perspective. In particular, modal intuitionistic logics do not enjoy a coalgebraic treatment, and there is a general lack of duality results for them. To remedy this, we use a generalisation of both algebras and coalgebras called dialgebras. Guided by the research field of coalgebraic logic, we introduce the framework of dialgebraic logic. We show how a large class of modal intuitionistic logics can be modelled as dialgebraic logics and we prove dualities for them. We use the dialgebraic framework to prove general completeness, Hennessy-Milner, representation and Goldblatt-Thomason theorems, and instantiate this to a wide variety of modal intuitionistic logics. Additionally, we use the dialgebraic perspective to investigate modal extensions of the meet-implication fragment of intuitionistic logic. We instantiate general dialgebraic results, and describe how modal meet-implication logics relate to modal intuitionistic logics