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

All finitely axiomatizable subframe logics containing the provability logic CSM are decidable

In this paper we investigate those extensions of the bimodal provability logic C⃗ SM0 (alias P⃗ RL1 or F⃗ −) which are subframe logics, i.e. whose general frames are closed under a certain type of substructures. Most bimodal provability logics are in this class. The main result states that all finitely axiomatizable subframe logics containing C⃗ SM0 are decidable. We note that, as a rule, interesting systems in this class do not have the finite model property and are not even complete with respect to Kripke semantics