On modal expansions of t-norm based logics with rational constants

Abstract

According to Zadeh, the term “fuzzy logic” has two different meanings: wide and narrow. In a narrow sense it is a logical system which aims a formalization of approximate reasoning, and so it can be considered an extension of many-valued logic. However, Zadeh also says that the agenda of fuzzy logic is quite different from that of traditional many-valued logic, as it addresses concepts like linguistic variable, fuzzy if-then rule, linguistic quantifiers etc. Hájek, in the preface of his foundational book Metamathematics of Fuzzy Logic, agrees with Zadeh’s distinction, but stressing that formal calculi of many-valued logics are the kernel of the so-called Basic Fuzzy logic (BL), having continuous triangular norms (t-norm) and their residua as semantics for the conjunction and implication respectively, and of its most prominent extensions, namely Lukasiewicz, Gödel and Product fuzzy logics. Taking advantage of the fact that a t-norm has residuum if, and only if, it is left-continuous, the logic of the left-continuous t-norms, called MTL, was soon after introduced.

On the other hand, classical modal logic is an active field of mathematical logic, originally introduced at the beginning of the XXth century for philosophical purposes, that more recently has shown to be very successful in many other areas, specially in computer science. That are the most well-known semantics for classical modal logics.

Modal expansions of non-classical logics, in particular of many-valued logics, have also been studied in the literature. In this thesis we focus on the study of some modal logics over MTL, using natural generalizations of the classical Kripke relational structures where propositions at possible words can be many-valued, but keeping classical accessibility relations.

In more detail, the main goal of this thesis has been to study modal expansions of the logic of a left-continuous t-norm, defined over the language of MTL expanded with rational truth-constants and the Monteiro-Baaz Delta-operator, whose intended (standard) semantics is given by Kripke models with crisp accessibility relations and taking the unit real interval [0, 1] as set of truth-values. To get complete axiomatizations, already known techniques based on the canonical model construction are uses, but this requires to ensure that the underlying (propositional) fuzzy logic is strongly standard complete. This constraint leads us to consider axiomatic systems with infinitary inference rules, already at the propositional level. A second goal of the thesis has been to also develop and automated reasoning software tool to solve satisfiability and logical consequence problems for some of the fuzzy logic modal logics considered.

This dissertation is structured in four parts. After a gentle introduction, Part I contains the needed preliminaries for the thesis be as self-contained as possible. Most of the theoretical results are developed in Parts II and III. Part II focuses on solving some problems concerning the strong standard completeness of underlying non-modal expansions. We first present and axiomatic system for the non-nodal propositional logic of a left-continuous t-norm who makes use of a unique infinitary inference rule, the “density rule”, that solves several problems pointed out in the literature. We further expand this axiomatic system in order to also characterize arbitrary operations over [0, 1] satisfying certain regularity conditions. However, since this axiomatic system turn out to be not well-behaved for the modal expansion, we search for alternative axiomatizations with some particular kind of inference rules (that will be called conjunctive). Unfortunately, this kind of axiomatization does not necessarily exist for all left-continuous t-norms (in particular, it does not exist for the Gödel logic case), but we identify a wide class of t-norms for which it works. This “well-behaved” t-norms include all ordinal sums of Lukasiewiczand Product t-norms.

Part III focuses on the modal expansion of the logics presented before. We propose axiomatic systems (which are, as expected, modal expansions of the ones given in the previous part) respectively strongly complete with respect to local and global Kripke semantics defined over frames with crisp accessibility relations and worlds evaluated over a “well-behaved” left-continuous t-norm. We also study some properties and extensions of these logics and also show how to use it for axiomatizing the possibilistic logic over the very same t-norm. Later on, we characterize the algebraic companion of these modal logics, provide some algebraic completeness results and study the relation between their Kripke and algebraic semantics.

Finally, Part IV of the thesis is devoted to a software application, mNiB-LoS, who uses Satisfability Modulo Theories in order to build an automated reasoning system to reason over modal logics evaluated over BL algebras. The acronym of this applications stands for a modal Nice BL-logics Solver. The use of BL logics along this part is motivated by the fact that continuous t-norms can be represented as ordinal sums of three particular t-norms: Gödel, Lukasiewicz and Product ones. It is then possible to show that these t-norms have alternative characterizations that, although equivalent from the point of view of the logic, have strong differences for what concerns the design, implementation and efficiency of the application. For practical reasons, the modal structures included in the solver are limited to the finite ones (with no bound on the cardinality).