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

Completeness for Flat Modal Fixpoint Logics

This paper exhibits a general and uniform method to prove completeness for certain modal fixpoint logics. Given a set \Gamma of modal formulas of the form \gamma(x, p1, . . ., pn), where x occurs only positively in \gamma, the language L\sharp (\Gamma) is obtained by adding to the language of polymodal logic a connective \sharp\_\gamma for each \gamma \epsilon. The term \sharp\_\gamma (\varphi1, . . ., \varphin) is meant to be interpreted as the least fixed point of the functional interpretation of the term \gamma(x, \varphi 1, . . ., \varphi n). We consider the following problem: given \Gamma, construct an axiom system which is sound and complete with respect to the concrete interpretation of the language L\sharp (\Gamma) on Kripke frames. We prove two results that solve this problem. First, let K\sharp (\Gamma) be the logic obtained from the basic polymodal K by adding a Kozen-Park style fixpoint axiom and a least fixpoint rule, for each fixpoint connective \sharp\_\gamma. Provided that each indexing formula \gamma satisfies the syntactic criterion of being untied in x, we prove this axiom system to be complete. Second, addressing the general case, we prove the soundness and completeness of an extension K+ (\Gamma) of K\_\sharp (\Gamma). This extension is obtained via an effective procedure that, given an indexing formula \gamma as input, returns a finite set of axioms and derivation rules for \sharp\_\gamma, of size bounded by the length of \gamma. Thus the axiom system K+ (\Gamma) is finite whenever \Gamma is finite

MacNeille completion and profinite completion can coincide on finitely generated modal algebras

Following Bezhanishvili & Vosmaer, we confirm a conjecture of Yde Venema by piecing together results from various authors. Specifically, we show that if $\mathbb{A}$ is a residually finite, finitely generated modal algebra such that $\operatorname{HSP}(\mathbb{A})$ has equationally definable principal congruences, then the profinite completion of $\mathbb{A}$ is isomorphic to its MacNeille completion, and $\Diamond$ is smooth. Specific examples of such modal algebras are the free $\mathbf{K4}$-algebra and the free $\mathbf{PDL}$-algebra.Comment: 5 page

Modal definability in enriched languages

Abstract The paper deals with polymodal languages combined with stan-dard semantics defined by means of some conditions on the frames. So a notion of "polymodal base " arises which provides various enrichments of the classical modal language. One of these enrichments, viz. the base £(R,-R), with modalities over a relation and over its complement, is the paper's main paradigm. The modal definability (in the spirit of van Benthem's correspon-dence theory) of arbitrary and ~-elementary classes of frames in this base and in some of its extensions, e.g., £(R,-R,R-1,_R-1), £(R,-R,=I=) etc., is described, and numerous examples of conditions definable there, as well as undefinable ones, are adduced. 81 Introduction Undoubtedly, first-order languages are reliable and universal tools for formalization. However, in some cases the cost of this universality is not fully acceptable: on the one hand we have the undecidability results, and on the other the fact that the expressive power of first-order languages does no