428 research outputs found
Uniform interpolation and coherence
A variety V is said to be coherent if any finitely generated subalgebra of a
finitely presented member of V is finitely presented. It is shown here that V
is coherent if and only if it satisfies a restricted form of uniform deductive
interpolation: that is, any compact congruence on a finitely generated free
algebra of V restricted to a free algebra over a subset of the generators is
again compact. A general criterion is obtained for establishing failures of
coherence, and hence also of uniform deductive interpolation. This criterion is
then used in conjunction with properties of canonical extensions to prove that
coherence and uniform deductive interpolation fail for certain varieties of
Boolean algebras with operators (in particular, algebras of modal logic K and
its standard non-transitive extensions), double-Heyting algebras, residuated
lattices, and lattices
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
Canonical extensions and ultraproducts of polarities
J{\'o}nsson and Tarski's notion of the perfect extension of a Boolean algebra
with operators has evolved into an extensive theory of canonical extensions of
lattice-based algebras. After reviewing this evolution we make two
contributions. First it is shown that the failure of a variety of algebras to
be closed under canonical extensions is witnessed by a particular one of its
free algebras. The size of the set of generators of this algebra can be made a
function of a collection of varieties and is a kind of Hanf number for
canonical closure. Secondly we study the complete lattice of stable subsets of
a polarity structure, and show that if a class of polarities is closed under
ultraproducts, then its stable set lattices generate a variety that is closed
under canonical extensions. This generalises an earlier result of the author
about generation of canonically closed varieties of Boolean algebras with
operators, which was in turn an abstraction of the result that a first-order
definable class of Kripke frames determines a modal logic that is valid in its
so-called canonical frames
Coherence in Modal Logic
A variety is said to be coherent if the finitely generated subalgebras of its
finitely presented members are also finitely presented. In a recent paper by
the authors it was shown that coherence forms a key ingredient of the uniform
deductive interpolation property for equational consequence in a variety, and a
general criterion was given for the failure of coherence (and hence uniform
deductive interpolation) in varieties of algebras with a term-definable
semilattice reduct. In this paper, a more general criterion is obtained and
used to prove the failure of coherence and uniform deductive interpolation for
a broad family of modal logics, including K, KT, K4, and S4
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