Lots of new stuff in the
Open Logic repository! I’m teaching modal logic this term, and my ambitious goal is to have, by the end of term or soon thereafter, another nicely organized and typeset open textbook on modal logic. The working title is
Boxes and Diamonds, and you can check out what’s there so far on the
builds site.
This project of course required new material on modal logic. So far this consists in revised and expanded notes by our dear late colleague Aldo Antonelli. These now live in
content/normal-modal-logic
and cover relational models for normal modal logics, frame correspondence, derivations, canonical models, and filtrations. So that’s one big exciting addition.
Since the OLP didn’t cover propositional logic separately, I just now added that part as well so I can include it as review chapters. There’s a short chapter on truth-value semantics in
propositional-logic/syntax-and-semantics
. However, all the proof systems and completeness for them are covered as well. I didn’t write anything new for those, but rather made the respective sections for first-order logic flexible. OLP now has an
FOL
“tag”: if
FOL
is set to true, and you compile the chapter on the sequent calculus, say, you get the full first-order version with soundness proved relative to first-order structures. If
FOL
is set to false, the rules for the quantifiers and identity are omitted, and soundness is proved relative to propositional valuations. The same goes for the completeness theorem: with
FOL
set to false, it leaves out the Henkin construction and constructs a valuation from a complete consistent set rather than a term model from a saturated complete consistent set. This works fine if you need only one or the other; if you want both, you’ll currently get a lot of repetition. I hope to add code so that you can first compile without
FOL
then with, and the second pass will refer to the text produced by the first pass rather than do everything from scratch. You can compare the two versions in the
complete PDF.
Proofs systems for modal logics are tricky; and many systems don’t have nice, say, natural deduction systems. The tableau method, however, works very nicely and uniformly. The OLP didn’t have a chapter on tableaux, so this motivated me to add that as well. Tableaux are also often covered in intro logic courses (often called “truth trees”), so having them as a proof system included has the added advantage of tying in better with introductory logic material. I opted for prefixed tableaux (true and false are explicitly labelled, rather than implicit in negated and unnegated formulas), since that lends itself more easily to a comparison with the sequent calculus, but also because it extends directly to many-valued logics. The material on tableaux lives in
first-order-logic/tableaux
.
Thanks to
Clea Rees for the the
prooftrees
package, which made it much easier to typeset the tableaux, and to
Alex Kocurek for his
tips on doing modal diagrams in Tikz.