Event Detail

Fri May 6, 2022
60 Evans Hall
4:10–5 PM
Logic Colloquium
Johan van Benthem (Stanford University)
Modal Logic of Dependence: the view from below

I will present a minimalist modal approach to modeling functional dependence which has a simple decidable base logic LFD. LFD can be viewed as a form of first-order logic over generalized semantics, but also as an epistemic logic with an emphasis on information as correlation. Just recently and perhaps surprisingly, LFD has turned out intertranslatable with the Guarded Fragment of FOL.

On the LFD platform we can analyze further notions of correlation that increase complexity by using stronger vocabulary or by working over richer concrete domains. I will give illustrations that involve adding independence, dynamic modalities over universes of models, temporal dependence in dynamical systems, and topological versions of LFD, all analyzed stepwise from below.