Counterfactual Logic and the Necessity of Mathematics

This paper is concerned with counterfactual logic and its implications for the modal status of mathematical claims. It is most directly a response to an ambitious program by Yli-Vakkuri and Hawthorne (2018), who seek to establish that mathematics is committed to its own necessity. I claim that their argument fails to establish this result for two reasons. First, their assumptions force our hand on a controversial debate within counterfactual logic. In particular, they license counterfactual strengthening— the inference from ‘If A were true then C would be true’ to ‘If A and B were true then C would be true’—which many reject. Second, the system they develop is provably equivalent to appending Deduction Theorem to a T modal logic. It is unsurprising that the combination of Deduction Theorem with T results in necessitation; indeed, it is precisely for this reason that many logicians reject Deduction Theorem in modal contexts. If Deduction Theorem is unacceptable for modal logic, it cannot be assumed to derive the necessity of mathematic

Dual-Context Calculi for Modal Logic

We present natural deduction systems and associated modal lambda calculi for the necessity fragments of the normal modal logics K, T, K4, GL and S4. These systems are in the dual-context style: they feature two distinct zones of assumptions, one of which can be thought as modal, and the other as intuitionistic. We show that these calculi have their roots in in sequent calculi. We then investigate their metatheory, equip them with a confluent and strongly normalizing notion of reduction, and show that they coincide with the usual Hilbert systems up to provability. Finally, we investigate a categorical semantics which interprets the modality as a product-preserving functor.Comment: Full version of article previously presented at LICS 2017 (see arXiv:1602.04860v4 or doi: 10.1109/LICS.2017.8005089

Generic Modal Cut Elimination Applied to Conditional Logics

We develop a general criterion for cut elimination in sequent calculi for propositional modal logics, which rests on absorption of cut, contraction, weakening and inversion by the purely modal part of the rule system. Our criterion applies also to a wide variety of logics outside the realm of normal modal logic. We give extensive example instantiations of our framework to various conditional logics. For these, we obtain fully internalised calculi which are substantially simpler than those known in the literature, along with leaner proofs of cut elimination and complexity. In one case, conditional logic with modus ponens and conditional excluded middle, cut elimination and complexity were explicitly stated as open in the literature

Propositional Logics Complexity and the Sub-Formula Property

In 1979 Richard Statman proved, using proof-theory, that the purely implicational fragment of Intuitionistic Logic (M-imply) is PSPACE-complete. He showed a polynomially bounded translation from full Intuitionistic Propositional Logic into its implicational fragment. By the PSPACE-completeness of S4, proved by Ladner, and the Goedel translation from S4 into Intuitionistic Logic, the PSPACE- completeness of M-imply is drawn. The sub-formula principle for a deductive system for a logic L states that whenever F1,...,Fk proves A, there is a proof in which each formula occurrence is either a sub-formula of A or of some of Fi. In this work we extend Statman result and show that any propositional (possibly modal) structural logic satisfying a particular formulation of the sub-formula principle is in PSPACE. If the logic includes the minimal purely implicational logic then it is PSPACE-complete. As a consequence, EXPTIME-complete propositional logics, such as PDL and the common-knowledge epistemic logic with at least 2 agents satisfy this particular sub-formula principle, if and only if, PSPACE=EXPTIME. We also show how our technique can be used to prove that any finitely many-valued logic has the set of its tautologies in PSPACE.Comment: In Proceedings DCM 2014, arXiv:1504.0192

Non-normal modalities in variants of Linear Logic

This article presents modal versions of resource-conscious logics. We concentrate on extensions of variants of Linear Logic with one minimal non-normal modality. In earlier work, where we investigated agency in multi-agent systems, we have shown that the results scale up to logics with multiple non-minimal modalities. Here, we start with the language of propositional intuitionistic Linear Logic without the additive disjunction, to which we add a modality. We provide an interpretation of this language on a class of Kripke resource models extended with a neighbourhood function: modal Kripke resource models. We propose a Hilbert-style axiomatization and a Gentzen-style sequent calculus. We show that the proof theories are sound and complete with respect to the class of modal Kripke resource models. We show that the sequent calculus admits cut elimination and that proof-search is in PSPACE. We then show how to extend the results when non-commutative connectives are added to the language. Finally, we put the logical framework to use by instantiating it as logics of agency. In particular, we propose a logic to reason about the resource-sensitive use of artefacts and illustrate it with a variety of examples

Reasoning about Knowledge in Linear Logic: Modalities and Complexity

In a recent paper, Jean-Yves Girard commented that ”it has been a long time since philosophy has stopped intereacting with logic”[17]. Actually, it has no