76 research outputs found
New foundations for branching space-times
The theory of branching space-times, put forward by Belnap (Synthese 92, 1992), considers indeterminism as local in space and time. In the axiomatic foundations of that theory, so-called choice points mark the points at which the (local) possible future can turn out in different ways. Working under the assumption of choice points is suitable for many applications, but has an unwelcome topological consequence that makes it difficult to employ branching space-times to represent a range of possible physical space-times.
Therefore it is interesting to develop a branching space-times theory without choice points. This is what we set out to do in this paper, providing new foundations for branching spacetimes in terms of choice sets rather than choice points. After motivating and developing the resulting theory in formal detail, we show that it is possible to translate structures of one style into structures of the other style and vice versa. This result shows that the underlying idea of indeterminism as the branching of spatio-temporal histories is robust with respect to different implementations, making a choice between them a matter of expediency rather than of principle
On the Correspondence between Display Postulates and Deep Inference in Nested Sequent Calculi for Tense Logics
We consider two styles of proof calculi for a family of tense logics,
presented in a formalism based on nested sequents. A nested sequent can be seen
as a tree of traditional single-sided sequents. Our first style of calculi is
what we call "shallow calculi", where inference rules are only applied at the
root node in a nested sequent. Our shallow calculi are extensions of Kashima's
calculus for tense logic and share an essential characteristic with display
calculi, namely, the presence of structural rules called "display postulates".
Shallow calculi enjoy a simple cut elimination procedure, but are unsuitable
for proof search due to the presence of display postulates and other structural
rules. The second style of calculi uses deep-inference, whereby inference rules
can be applied at any node in a nested sequent. We show that, for a range of
extensions of tense logic, the two styles of calculi are equivalent, and there
is a natural proof theoretic correspondence between display postulates and deep
inference. The deep inference calculi enjoy the subformula property and have no
display postulates or other structural rules, making them a better framework
for proof search
Classical BI: Its Semantics and Proof Theory
We present Classical BI (CBI), a new addition to the family of bunched logics
which originates in O'Hearn and Pym's logic of bunched implications BI. CBI
differs from existing bunched logics in that its multiplicative connectives
behave classically rather than intuitionistically (including in particular a
multiplicative version of classical negation). At the semantic level,
CBI-formulas have the normal bunched logic reading as declarative statements
about resources, but its resource models necessarily feature more structure
than those for other bunched logics; principally, they satisfy the requirement
that every resource has a unique dual. At the proof-theoretic level, a very
natural formalism for CBI is provided by a display calculus \`a la Belnap,
which can be seen as a generalisation of the bunched sequent calculus for BI.
In this paper we formulate the aforementioned model theory and proof theory for
CBI, and prove some fundamental results about the logic, most notably
completeness of the proof theory with respect to the semantics.Comment: 42 pages, 8 figure
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