From IF to BI: a tale of dependence and separation

We take a fresh look at the logics of informational dependence and independence of Hintikka and Sandu and Vaananen, and their compositional semantics due to Hodges. We show how Hodges' semantics can be seen as a special case of a general construction, which provides a context for a useful completeness theorem with respect to a wider class of models. We shed some new light on each aspect of the logic. We show that the natural propositional logic carried by the semantics is the logic of Bunched Implications due to Pym and O'Hearn, which combines intuitionistic and multiplicative connectives. This introduces several new connectives not previously considered in logics of informational dependence, but which we show play a very natural role, most notably intuitionistic implication. As regards the quantifiers, we show that their interpretation in the Hodges semantics is forced, in that they are the image under the general construction of the usual Tarski semantics; this implies that they are adjoints to substitution, and hence uniquely determined. As for the dependence predicate, we show that this is definable from a simpler predicate, of constancy or dependence on nothing. This makes essential use of the intuitionistic implication. The Armstrong axioms for functional dependence are then recovered as a standard set of axioms for intuitionistic implication. We also prove a full abstraction result in the style of Hodges, in which the intuitionistic implication plays a very natural r\^ole.Comment: 28 pages, journal versio

Upwards Closed Dependencies in Team Semantics

We prove that adding upwards closed first-order dependency atoms to first-order logic with team semantics does not increase its expressive power (with respect to sentences), and that the same remains true if we also add constancy atoms. As a consequence, the negations of functional dependence, conditional independence, inclusion and exclusion atoms can all be added to first-order logic without increasing its expressive power. Furthermore, we define a class of bounded upwards closed dependencies and we prove that unbounded dependencies cannot be defined in terms of bounded ones.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2013, arXiv:1307.416

Team Semantics and Recursive Enumerability

It is well known that dependence logic captures the complexity class NP, and it has recently been shown that inclusion logic captures P on ordered models. These results demonstrate that team semantics offers interesting new possibilities for descriptive complexity theory. In order to properly understand the connection between team semantics and descriptive complexity, we introduce an extension D* of dependence logic that can define exactly all recursively enumerable classes of finite models. Thus D* provides an approach to computation alternative to Turing machines. The essential novel feature in D* is an operator that can extend the domain of the considered model by a finite number of fresh elements. Due to the close relationship between generalized quantifiers and oracles, we also investigate generalized quantifiers in team semantics. We show that monotone quantifiers of type (1) can be canonically eliminated from quantifier extensions of first-order logic by introducing corresponding generalized dependence atoms

The Budget-Constrained Functional Dependency

Armstrong's axioms of functional dependency form a well-known logical system that captures properties of functional dependencies between sets of database attributes. This article assumes that there are costs associated with attributes and proposes an extension of Armstrong's system for reasoning about budget-constrained functional dependencies in such a setting. The main technical result of this article is the completeness theorem for the proposed logical system. Although the proposed axioms are obtained by just adding cost subscript to the original Armstrong's axioms, the proof of the completeness for the proposed system is significantly more complicated than that for the Armstrong's system

Characterizing Quantifier Extensions of Dependence Logic

We characterize the expressive power of extensions of Dependence Logic and Independence Logic by monotone generalized quantifiers in terms of quantifier extensions of existential second-order logic.Comment: 9 page

Metalogic and the Overgeneration Argument

A prominent objection against the logicality of second-order logic is the so-called Overgeneration Argument. However, it is far from clear how this argument is to be understood. In the first part of the article, we examine the argument and locate its main source, namely, the alleged entanglement of second-order logic and mathematics. We then identify various reasons why the entanglement may be thought to be problematic. In the second part of the article, we take a metatheoretic perspective on the matter. We prove a number of results establishing that the entanglement is sensitive to the kind of semantics used for second-order logic. These results provide evidence that by moving from the standard set-theoretic semantics for second-order logic to a semantics which makes use of higher-order resources, the entanglement either disappears or may no longer be in conflict with the logicality of second-order logic

Decidability of predicate logics with team semantics

We study the complexity of predicate logics based on team semantics. We show that the satisfiability problems of two-variable independence logic and inclusion logic are both NEXPTIME-complete. Furthermore, we show that the validity problem of two-variable dependence logic is undecidable, thereby solving an open problem from the team semantics literature. We also briefly analyse the complexity of the Bernays-Sch\"onfinkel-Ramsey prefix classes of dependence logic.Comment: Extended version of a MFCS 2016 article. Changes on the earlier arXiv version: title changed, added the result on validity of two-variable dependence logic, restructurin