Tree Rewriting Calculi for Strictly Positive Logics
Abstract
We study strictly positive logics in the language , which constructs formulas from , propositional variables, conjunction, and diamond modalities. We begin with the base system , the strictly positive fragment of polymodal , and examine its extensions obtained by adding axioms such as monotonicity, transitivity, and the hierarchy-sensitive interaction axiom , which governs the interplay between modalities of different strengths. The strongest of these systems is the Reflection Calculus (), which corresponds to the strictly positive fragment of polymodal . Our main contribution is a formulation of these logics as tree rewriting systems, establishing both adequacy and completeness through a correspondence between formulas and inductively defined modal trees. We also provide a normalization of the rewriting process, which has exponential complexity when axiom is absent; otherwise we provide a double-exponential bound. By introducing tree rewriting calculi as practical provability tools for strictly positive logics, we aim to deepen their proof-theoretic analysis and computational applications.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.18240,
title = {Tree Rewriting Calculi for Strictly Positive Logics},
author = {Sofía Santiago-Fernández and David Fernández-Duque and Joost J. Joosten},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.18240},
year = {2025}
}