5,432 research outputs found
Changing a semantics: opportunism or courage?
The generalized models for higher-order logics introduced by Leon Henkin, and
their multiple offspring over the years, have become a standard tool in many
areas of logic. Even so, discussion has persisted about their technical status,
and perhaps even their conceptual legitimacy. This paper gives a systematic
view of generalized model techniques, discusses what they mean in mathematical
and philosophical terms, and presents a few technical themes and results about
their role in algebraic representation, calibrating provability, lowering
complexity, understanding fixed-point logics, and achieving set-theoretic
absoluteness. We also show how thinking about Henkin's approach to semantics of
logical systems in this generality can yield new results, dispelling the
impression of adhocness. This paper is dedicated to Leon Henkin, a deep
logician who has changed the way we all work, while also being an always open,
modest, and encouraging colleague and friend.Comment: 27 pages. To appear in: The life and work of Leon Henkin: Essays on
his contributions (Studies in Universal Logic) eds: Manzano, M., Sain, I. and
Alonso, E., 201
Complete Additivity and Modal Incompleteness
In this paper, we tell a story about incompleteness in modal logic. The story
weaves together a paper of van Benthem, `Syntactic aspects of modal
incompleteness theorems,' and a longstanding open question: whether every
normal modal logic can be characterized by a class of completely additive modal
algebras, or as we call them, V-BAOs. Using a first-order reformulation of the
property of complete additivity, we prove that the modal logic that starred in
van Benthem's paper resolves the open question in the negative. In addition,
for the case of bimodal logic, we show that there is a naturally occurring
logic that is incomplete with respect to V-BAOs, namely the provability logic
GLB. We also show that even logics that are unsound with respect to such
algebras do not have to be more complex than the classical propositional
calculus. On the other hand, we observe that it is undecidable whether a
syntactically defined logic is V-complete. After these results, we generalize
the Blok Dichotomy to degrees of V-incompleteness. In the end, we return to van
Benthem's theme of syntactic aspects of modal incompleteness
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