RSL

Mereological Bimodal Logics

Journal PaperRSL
Dazhu Li, Yanjing Wang
Review of Symbolic Logic 15(4): 823 - 858
Publication year: 2022

In this paper, using a propositional modal language extended with the window modality, we capture the first-order properties of various mereological theories. In this setting, \Box \phi reads all my parts are \phi, interpreted on the models with a whole-part binary relation under various constraints. We show that all the usual mereological theories can be captured by modal formulas in our language via frame correspondence. We also correct a mistake in the existing completeness proof for a basic system of mereology by providing a new construction of the canonical model.

 

Bisimulations for Knowing How Logics

Beyond know-thatJournal PaperRSL
Raul Fervari, Fernando R. Velázquez-Quesada, Yanjing Wang
Review of Symbolic Logic (in Press)
Publication year: 2021

As a new type of epistemic logic, the logic of knowing how essentially captures the high-level epistemic reasoning about the knowledge of various plans to achieve certain goals. Existing work focuses on the axiomatizations of such logics. This paper makes the first study of their model theoretical properties, by introducing suitable notions of bisimulation for a family of five logics of knowing how based on various notions of plans. As an application of these notions of bisimulation, we study and compare the expressive power of these logics.

(A preliminary version of this paper was first presented at SR2017.)

Contingency and Knowing Whether

Beyond know-thatJournal PaperRSLSelected
Fan, Jie and Wang, Yanjing and Ditmarsch, Hans Van
Review of Symbolic Logic, 8(1): 75—107, 2015
Publication year: 2015

Abstract: A proposition is noncontingent, if it is necessarily true or it is necessarily false. In an epistemic context, ‘a proposition is noncontingent’ means that you know whether the proposition is true. In this paper, we study contingency logic with the noncontingency operator ? but without the necessity operator 2. This logic is not a normal modal logic, because Kw(\phi \to \psi)\to(Kw \phi\to \psi) is not valid. Contingency logic cannot define many usual frame properties, and its expressive power is weaker than that of basic modal logic over classes of models without reflexivity. These features make axiomatizing contingency logics nontrivial, especially for the axiomatization over symmetric frames. In this paper, we axiomatize contingency logics over various frame classes using a novel method other than the methods provided in the literature, based on the ‘almost-definability’ schema AD proposed in our previous work. We also present extensions of contingency logic with dynamic operators. Finally, we compare our work to the related work in the fields of contingency logic and ignorance logic, where the two research communities have similar results but are apparently unaware of each other’s work. One goal of our paper is to bridge this gap.