AN ABSTRACT APPROACH TO CONSEQUENCE RELATIONS

We generalise the Blok–Jónsson account of structural consequence relations, later developed by Galatos, Tsinakis and other authors, in such a way as to naturally accommodate multiset consequence. While Blok and Jónsson admit, in place of sheer formulas, a wider range of syntactic units to be manipulated in deductions (including sequents or equations), these objects are invariably aggregated via set-theoretical union. Our approach is more general in that nonidempotent forms of premiss and conclusion aggregation, including multiset sum and fuzzy set union, are considered. In their abstract form, thus, deductive relations are defined as additional compatible preorderings over certain partially ordered monoids. We investigate these relations using categorical methods and provide analogues of the main results obtained in the general theory of consequence relations. Then we focus on the driving example of multiset deductive relations, providing variations of the methods of matrix semantics and Hilbert systems in Abstract Algebraic Logic.

Imaginary groups: lazy monoids and reversible computation

We use constructions in monoid and group theory to exhibit an adjunction between the category of partially ordered monoids and lazy monoid homomorphisms and the category of partially ordered groups and group homomorphisms such that the unit of the adjunction is injective. We also prove a similar result for sets acted on by monoids and groups.We introduce the new notion of a lazy homomorphism for a function f between partially ordered monoids such that f(m ○ m′) ≤ f(m) ○ f(m′).Every monoid can be endowed with the discrete partial ordering (m ≤ m′ if and only if m=m′), so our constructions provide a way of embedding monoids into groups. A simple counterexample (the two-element monoid with a non-trivial idempotent) and some calculations show that one can never hope for such an embedding to be a monoid homomorphism, so the price paid for injecting a monoid into a group is that we must weaken the notion of a homomorphism to this new notion of a lazy homomorphism.The computational significance of this is that a monoid is an abstract model of computation – or at least of ‘operations’ – and, similarly, a group models reversible computations/operations. With this reading, the adjunction with its injective unit gives a systematic high-level way of faithfully translating an irreversible system into a ‘lazy’ reversible one.Informally, but perhaps informatively, we can describe this work as follows: we give an abstract analysis of how we can sensibly add ‘undo’ (in the sense of ‘control-Z’).

Logics without the contraction rule

We will study syntactical and semantical properties of propositional logics weaker than the intuitionistic, in which the contraction rule (or, the exchange rule or the weakening rule, in some cases) does not hold. Here, the contraction rule means the rule of inference of the formif we formulate our logics in a Gentzen-type formal system. Some syntactical properties of these logics have been studied firstly by the second author in [11], in connection with the study of BCK-algebras (for information on BCK-algebras, see [9]). There, it turned out that such a syntactical method is a powerful and promising tool in studying BCK-algebras. Using this method, considerable progress has been made since then (see, e.g., [8], [18], [27]).In this paper, we will study these logics more comprehensively. We notice here that the distributive lawdoes not hold necessarily in these logics. By adding some axioms (or initial sequents) and rules of inference to these basic logics, we can obtain a lot of interesting nonclassical logics such as Łukasiewicz's many-valued logics, relevant logics, the intuitionistic logic and logics related to BCK-algebras, which have been studied separately until now. Thus, our approach will give a uniform way of dealing with these logics. One of our two main tools in doing so is Gentzen-type formulation of logics in syntax, and the other is semantics defined by using partially ordered monoids.