English

Provability Interpretation of Propositional and Modal Logics

Logic 2017-09-04 v2

Abstract

In 1933, G\"odel introduced a provability interpretation of the propositional intuitionistic logic to establish a formalization for the BHK interpretation. He used the modal system, S4\mathbf{S4}, as a formalization of the intuitive concept of provability and then translated IPC\mathbf{IPC} to S4\mathbf{S4}. His work suggested the problem to find a concrete provability interpretation of the modal logic S4\mathbf{S4}. In this paper, we will try to answer this problem. In fact, we will generalize Solovay's provability interpretation of the modal logic GL\mathbf{GL} to capture other modal logics such as K4\mathbf{K4}, KD4\mathbf{KD4} and S4\mathbf{S4}. Then we will use these results to find a formalization for the BHK interpretation and we will show that with different interpretations of the BHK interpretation, we can capture some of the propositional logics such as Intuitionistic logic, minimal logic and Visser-Ruitenburg's basic logic. Moreover, we will show that there is no provability interpretation for any extension of KD45\mathbf{KD45} and also there is no BHK interpretation for the classical propositional logic.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.07677,
  title  = {Provability Interpretation of Propositional and Modal Logics},
  author = {Amirhossein Akbar Tabatabai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.07677},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

74 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:27:12.105Z