English

Modal Logics that Bound the Circumference of Transitive Frames

Logic 2023-11-08 v2

Abstract

For each natural number nn we study the modal logic determined by the class of transitive Kripke frames in which there are no cycles of length greater than nn and no strictly ascending chains. The case n=0n=0 is the G\"odel-L\"ob provability logic. Each logic is axiomatised by adding a single axiom to K4, and is shown to have the finite model property and be decidable. We then consider a number of extensions of these logics, including restricting to reflexive frames to obtain a corresponding sequence of extensions of S4. When n=1n=1, this gives the famous logic of Grzegorczyk, known as S4Grz, which is the strongest modal companion to intuitionistic propositional logic. A topological semantic analysis shows that the nn-th member of the sequence of extensions of S4 is the logic of hereditarily n+1n+1-irresolvable spaces when the modality \Diamond is interpreted as the topological closure operation. We also study the definability of this class of spaces under the interpretation of \Diamond as the derived set (of limit points) operation. The variety of modal algebras validating the nn-th logic is shown to be generated by the powerset algebras of the finite frames with cycle length bounded by nn. Moreover each algebra in the variety is a model of the universal theory of the finite ones, and so is embeddable into an ultraproduct of them.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1905.11617,
  title  = {Modal Logics that Bound the Circumference of Transitive Frames},
  author = {Robert Goldblatt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.11617},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:28:14.141Z