Logics of (In)sane and (Un)reliable Beliefs

Inspired by an interesting quotation from the literature, we propose four modalities, called ‘sane belief’, ‘insane belief’, ‘reliable belief’ and ‘unreliable belief’, and introduce logics with each operator as the modal primitive. We show that the four modalities constitute a square of opposition, which indicates some interesting relationships among them. We compare the relative expressivity of these logics and other related logics, including a logic of false beliefs from the literature. The four main logics are all less expressive than the standard modal logic over various model classes, and the logics of sane and insane beliefs are, respectively, equally expressive as the logics of unreliable and reliable beliefs on any class of models. The logics of reliable and unreliable beliefs are then combined into a bimodal logic, which turns out to be equally expressive as the standard modal logic. Despite this, we cannot obtain a complete axiomatization of the minimal bimodal logic, by simply translating the axioms and rules of the minimal modal logic $\textbf{K}$ into the bimodal language. We then introduce a schematic modality which unifies reliable and unreliable beliefs and axiomatize it over the class of all frames and also the class of serial frames. This line of research is finally extended to unify sane and insane beliefs and some axiomatizations are given.

Knowing-How under Uncertainty (Extended Abstract)

Logical systems containing knowledge and know-how modalities have been investigated in several recent works. Independently, epistemic modal logics in which every knowledge modality is labeled with a degree of uncertainty have been proposed. This article combines these two research lines by introducing a bimodal logic containing knowledge and know-how modalities, both labeled with a degree of uncertainty. The main technical results are soundness, completeness, and incompleteness of the proposed logical system with respect to two classes of semantics.

COMPLETE ADDITIVITY AND MODAL INCOMPLETENESS

In this article, we tell a story about incompleteness in modal logic. The story weaves together an article of van Benthem (1979), “Syntactic aspects of modal incompleteness theorems,” and a longstanding open question: whether every normal modal logic can be characterized by a class ofcompletely additivemodal algebras, or as we call them,${\cal V}$-baos. Using a first-order reformulation of the property of complete additivity, we prove that the modal logic that starred in van Benthem’s article 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${\cal V}$-baos, namely the provability logic$GLB$(Japaridze, 1988; Boolos, 1993). 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${\cal V}$-complete. After these results, we generalize the Blok Dichotomy (Blok, 1978) to degrees of${\cal V}$-incompleteness. In the end, we return to van Benthem’s theme of syntactic aspects of modal incompleteness.

Erdős Graphs Resolve Fine's Canonicity Problem

We show that there exist 2ℵ0 equational classes of Boolean algebras with operators that are not generated by the complex algebras of any first-order definable class of relational structures. Using a variant of this construction, we resolve a long-standing question of Fine, by exhibiting a bimodal logic that is valid in its canonical frames, but is not sound and complete for any first-order definable class of Kripke frames (a monomodal example can then be obtained using simulation results of Thomason). The constructions use the result of Erdos that there are finite graphs with arbitrarily large chromatic number and girth.