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MODAL DECISION PROBLEMS

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Modal Logic as die Klassentheorie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thomasons analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Normal modal logics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Bloks dichotomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Chagrovs classication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Postmortem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Syntactical classes of modal logics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Sahlqvist logics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Uniform logics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Logics with 23-axioms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Logics with noniterative axioms . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Modal reduction principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Logics with n-variable axioms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Semantically constrained classes of modal logics . . . . . . . . Frame-theoretic characterisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Canonical formulas for K4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Canonical formulas for tense logics of linear time ows Decision problems for tense logics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Subframe logics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Superintuitionistic logics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 Intuitionistic frames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Canonical formulas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Modal companions and preservation theorems . . . . . 9.4 Completeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5 Medvedevs logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1 MODAL LOGIC AS DIE KLASSENTHEORIE There are dierent views on the subject of Modal Logic. For the purpose of this chapter it is important to distinguish between two of them. According to the local view, Modal Logic deals with a number of concrete modal logics. Since the beginning of the 20th century developers and users of Modal Logic from philosophy, mathematics, computer science, articial intelligence, linguistics and other elds have introduced and investigated dozens of particular modal logics suitable for their

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Frank Wolter and Michael Zakharyaschev

needs: epistemic, provability, temporal, dynamic, description, spatial, to mention just a few. With the number of concrete modal logics introduced in the literature growing, there came an understanding that it may be interesting and important to formulate general abstract notions of modal logics and to investigate the landscape of the resulting classes of logics and their properties. The pioneers of this global approach were Scroggs [127] who considered all extensions of S5, Dummett and Lemmon [33] who studied all logics between S4 and S5, Bull [14] and Fine [40] who investigated the logics containing S4.3, and Lemmon [86, 87, 88] and Segerberg [129] who launched a systematical investigation of various classes of modal logics. Two other inuential gures that should also be mentioned here are Kuznetsov [81, 84, 85] and Jankov [67, 66, 68, 69] who investigated the class of all extensions of intuitionistic propositional logic which is closely related to the class of modal logics containing S4; see Section 9. Although not formulated explicitly, the globalists dream research programme was to develop a mathematical machinery that could provide general solutions to the following major problems: 1 1. given a class of models/structures, axiomatise the modal logic it determines, decide in an eective way whether it has certain important properties, say, decidability, compactness, interpolation, etc., and determine its computational complexity. 2. given a modal logic in the form of a nite set of axioms and inference rules, characterise the (simplest, smallest, largest, etc.) class of models/structures with respect to which this logic is sound and complete, decide in an eective way whether it has important properties as above, and determine its computational complexity. This research programme is formulated in quite general terms and therefore can be interpreted in various ways. For example, it is not specied what kind of classes of frames/models we consider and what kind of axiomatic systems we take into account. Of course, dierent interpretations may lead to dierent solutions, but anyway rst results within this ambitious programme looked very promising indeed! For example, Bull [14] proved that all extensions of S4.3 have the nite model property and Fine [40] showed that all of them are nitely axiomatisable, and so decidable. (Actually, Dummett and Lemmon [33] claimed that all logics between S4 and S5 have the nite model property, but their proof was wrong: ten years later Jankov [68] constructed a counterexample.) In view of Makinsons theorem [94], one can eectively decide whether a given logic above K is consistent. Maksimova [95, 97] proved that two properties of logics containing S4 tabularity and interpolationare decidable as well. It seems that many modal logicians did believe in an eventual success of this Big Programme. In this chapter we analyse the development of Modal Logic within the research framework formulated above, starting from the beginning of the 1970s, although not necessarily in chronological order; for a historical analysis of mathematical modal logic the reader is referred to the recent paper of Goldblatt [57] and notes in [24]. Because of space limitations, we mainly concentrate on normal (multi-) modal logics and their decidability and completeness (in particular, with respect to Kripke or nite frames).
1 Kuznetsov did formulate such problems explicitly in the context of superintuitionistic logics; e.g., given an axiomatisation of a superintuitionistic logic, can we decide in an eective way whether the logic is characterised by a nite algebra?

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Roughly, our plan is as follows. We start in Section 2 with Thomasons explication (i ) of the semantical part (i) of the research programme above. Then, in Section 3, we lay the foundation for the most important syntactical notion of Modal Logic, namely, that of a normal modal logic. Having introduced an adequate semantics for normal modal logics in terms of general frames, we discuss in detail Bloks dichotomy in order to clarify the dierence between Thomasons semantical denition of modal logics and the syntactically dened normal modal logics. Based on this discussion, we then come to the appropriate renement (ii ) of the syntactical part (ii) of the research programme for normal modal logics and solutions to it given by Chagrov and Thomason. Although beautiful from a mathematical point of view, the results of Thomason and Chagrov are negative in the sense that almost all general algorithmic problems formulated in the Big Research Programme turn out to be undecidable. In the same way as the negative solution to the classical decision problem of Hilbert transformed the original problem into a classication problem, the negative solution to the modal decision problems brings us down to a more modest and realistic relativisation of the programme to various syntactically or semantically dened classes of modal logics. In Section 4, we consider logics axiomatised by formulas satisfying certain syntactical constraints, in particular, Sahlqvist formulas, uniform formulas, modal reduction principles, etc., and see whether such constraints allow us to prove general decidability/completeness results. In Section 5, we survey the literature on general decidability/completeness results for logics with some strong axioms, say, extensions of tabular and pretabular logics, logics of nite depth and width, extensions of S4.3, K5, etc. Then, in Section 6, we discuss an attempt to attack the Big Research Programme for normal extensions of K4 (that is, unimodal logics with transitive general frames) and the tense logic Lin (of linear ows of time) by means of nite representations of modally denable classes of frames via frame and subframe formulas of Jankov and Fine [69, 41, 45] and more general canonical formulas of [172, 174, 163]. This technique will be also used to draw and discuss connections between extensions of S4 and superintuitionistic logics in Section 9. In Section 7 we provide a positive solution to the Big Research Programme for the class of all tense logics of linear ows of time. In fact, it turns out that for this class of logics all the questions posed in the programme are decidable (sometimes even in nondeterministic polynomial time). In Section 8, we consider the class of subframe logicsi.e., logics determined by classes of (general) frames closed under the formation of substructures in the standard modeltheoretic senseand explore to what extent the research programme can be realised for this semantically dened class of modal logics. A number of important open problems are formulated throughout the chapter. 2 THOMASONS ANALYSIS

As we saw in Chapter 1, the standard propositional modal language with a countably innite set of propositional variables (say, p0 , p1 , . . . ), the Boolean connectives , (and their derivatives , , etc.) and unary modal operators 21 , . . . , 2n can be regarded as a basic tool for talking about relational structures F = W, R1 , . . . , Rn , where the Ri are binary relations on W = . We denote this n-modal language by MLn and call F an n-frame or simply a (Kripke) frame, if n is understood.