5,014 research outputs found
Lewis meets Brouwer: constructive strict implication
C. I. Lewis invented modern modal logic as a theory of "strict implication".
Over the classical propositional calculus one can as well work with the unary
box connective. Intuitionistically, however, the strict implication has greater
expressive power than the box and allows to make distinctions invisible in the
ordinary syntax. In particular, the logic determined by the most popular
semantics of intuitionistic K becomes a proper extension of the minimal normal
logic of the binary connective. Even an extension of this minimal logic with
the "strength" axiom, classically near-trivial, preserves the distinction
between the binary and the unary setting. In fact, this distinction and the
strong constructive strict implication itself has been also discovered by the
functional programming community in their study of "arrows" as contrasted with
"idioms". Our particular focus is on arithmetical interpretations of the
intuitionistic strict implication in terms of preservativity in extensions of
Heyting's Arithmetic.Comment: Our invited contribution to the collection "L.E.J. Brouwer, 50 years
later
Ontology: Towards a new synthesis
This introduction to the second international conference on Formal Ontology and
Information Systems presents a brief history of ontology as a discipline spanning the boundaries of philosophy and information science. We sketch some of the reasons for the growth of ontology in the information science field, and offer a preliminary stocktaking of how the term âontologyâ is currently used. We conclude by suggesting some grounds for optimism as concerns the future collaboration between philosophical ontologists and information scientists
The decision problem of modal product logics with a diagonal, and faulty counter machines
In the propositional modal (and algebraic) treatment of two-variable
first-order logic equality is modelled by a `diagonal' constant, interpreted in
square products of universal frames as the identity (also known as the
`diagonal') relation. Here we study the decision problem of products of two
arbitrary modal logics equipped with such a diagonal. As the presence or
absence of equality in two-variable first-order logic does not influence the
complexity of its satisfiability problem, one might expect that adding a
diagonal to product logics in general is similarly harmless. We show that this
is far from being the case, and there can be quite a big jump in complexity,
even from decidable to the highly undecidable. Our undecidable logics can also
be viewed as new fragments of first- order logic where adding equality changes
a decidable fragment to undecidable. We prove our results by a novel
application of counter machine problems. While our formalism apparently cannot
force reliable counter machine computations directly, the presence of a unique
diagonal in the models makes it possible to encode both lossy and
insertion-error computations, for the same sequence of instructions. We show
that, given such a pair of faulty computations, it is then possible to
reconstruct a reliable run from them
Data refinement for true concurrency
The majority of modern systems exhibit sophisticated concurrent behaviour, where several system components modify and observe the system state with fine-grained atomicity. Many systems (e.g., multi-core processors, real-time controllers) also exhibit truly concurrent behaviour, where multiple events can occur simultaneously. This paper presents data refinement defined in terms of an interval-based framework, which includes high-level operators that capture non-deterministic expression evaluation. By modifying the type of an interval, our theory may be specialised to cover data refinement of both discrete and continuous systems. We present an interval-based encoding of forward simulation, then prove that our forward simulation rule is sound with respect to our data refinement definition. A number of rules for decomposing forward simulation proofs over both sequential and parallel composition are developed
Contracts for Systems Design: Theory
Aircrafts, trains, cars, plants, distributed telecommunication military or health care systems,and more, involve systems design as a critical step. Complexity has caused system design times and coststo go severely over budget so as to threaten the health of entire industrial sectors. Heuristic methods andstandard practices do not seem to scale with complexity so that novel design methods and tools based on astrong theoretical foundation are sorely needed. Model-based design as well as other methodologies suchas layered and compositional design have been used recently but a unified intellectual framework with acomplete design flow supported by formal tools is still lacking.Recently an âorthogonalâ approach has been proposed that can be applied to all methodologies introducedthus far to provide a rigorous scaffolding for verification, analysis and abstraction/refinement: contractbaseddesign. Several results have been obtained in this domain but a unified treatment of the topic that canhelp in putting contract-based design in perspective is missing. This paper intends to provide such treatmentwhere contracts are precisely defined and characterized so that they can be used in design methodologiessuch as the ones mentioned above with no ambiguity. In addition, the paper provides an important linkbetween interface and contract theories to show similarities and correspondences.This paper is complemented by a companion paper where contract based design is illustrated throughuse cases
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