Independence-friendly logic (IF logic; proposed by
Jaakko Hintikka
Kaarlo Jaakko Juhani Hintikka (12 January 1929 – 12 August 2015) was a Finnish philosopher and logician.
Life and career
Hintikka was born in Helsingin maalaiskunta (now Vantaa).
In 1953, he received his doctorate from the University of Hels ...
and in 1989) is an extension of classical
first-order logic
First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quanti ...
(FOL) by means of slashed quantifiers of the form
and
, where
is a finite set of variables. The intended reading of
is "there is a
which is functionally independent from the variables in
". IF logic allows one to express more general patterns of dependence between variables than those which are implicit in first-order logic. This greater level of generality leads to an actual increase in expressive power; the set of
IF sentences can characterize the same classes of structures as
existential second-order logic (
).
For example, it can express
branching quantifier In logic a branching quantifier, also called a Henkin quantifier, finite partially ordered quantifier or even nonlinear quantifier, is a partial ordering
:\langle Qx_1\dots Qx_n\rangle
of quantifiers for ''Q'' ∈ . It is a special cas ...
sentences, such as the formula
which expresses infinity in the empty signature; this cannot be done in FOL. Therefore, first-order logic cannot, in general, express this pattern of dependency, in which
depends ''only'' on
and
, and
depends ''only'' on
and
. IF logic is more general than
branching quantifier In logic a branching quantifier, also called a Henkin quantifier, finite partially ordered quantifier or even nonlinear quantifier, is a partial ordering
:\langle Qx_1\dots Qx_n\rangle
of quantifiers for ''Q'' ∈ . It is a special cas ...
s, for example in that it can express dependencies that are not transitive, such as in the quantifier prefix
, which expresses that
depends on
, and
depends on
, but
does not depend on
.
The introduction of IF logic was partly motivated by the attempt of extending the
game semantics of first-order logic to games of
imperfect information. Indeed, a semantics for IF sentences can be given in terms of these kinds of games (or, alternatively, by means of a translation procedure to existential second-order logic). A semantics for open formulas cannot be given in the form of a
Tarskian semantics; an adequate semantics must specify what it means for a formula to be satisfied by a set of assignments of common variable domain (a ''team'') rather than satisfaction by a single assignment. Such a ''team semantics'' was developed by
Hodges.
Independence-friendly logic is translation equivalent, at the level of sentences, with a number of other logical systems based on team semantics, such as
dependence logic, dependence-friendly logic, exclusion logic and independence logic; with the exception of the latter, IF logic is known to be equiexpressive to these logics also at the level of open formulas. However, IF logic differs from all the above-mentioned systems in that it lacks ''locality'': the meaning of an open formula cannot be described just in terms of the free variables of the formula; it is instead dependent on the context in which the formula occurs.
Independence-friendly logic shares a number of metalogical properties with first-order logic, but there are some differences, including lack of closure under (classical, contradictory) negation and higher complexity for deciding the validity of formulas. Extended IF logic addresses the closure problem, but its game-theoretical semantics is more complicated, and such logic corresponds to a larger fragment of second-order logic, a proper subset of
.
Hintikka has argued that IF and extended IF logic should be used as a basis for the
foundations of mathematics
Foundations of mathematics is the study of the philosophical and logical and/or algorithmic basis of mathematics, or, in a broader sense, the mathematical investigation of what underlies the philosophical theories concerning the nature of mathe ...
; this proposal has been met in some cases with skepticism.
Syntax
A number of slightly different presentations of independence-friendly logic have appeared in the literature; here we follow Mann et al (2011).
Terms and atomic formulas
For a fixed signature σ, terms and atomic formulas are defined exactly as in
first-order logic with equality.
IF formulas
Formulas of IF logic are defined as follows:
# Any atomic formula
is an IF formula.
# If
is an IF formula, then
is an IF formula.
# If
and
are IF formulas, then
and
are IF formulas.
# If
is a formula,
is a variable, and
is a finite set of variables, then
and
are also IF formulas.
Free variables
The set
of the free variables of an IF formula
is defined inductively as follows:
# If
is an atomic formula, then
is the set of all variables occurring in it.
#
;
#
;
#
.
The last clause is the only one that differs from the clauses for first-order logic, the difference being that also the variables in the slash set
are counted as free variables.
IF Sentences
An IF formula
such that
is an ''IF sentence''.
Semantics
Three main approaches have been proposed for the definition of the semantics of IF logic. The first two, based respectively on games of imperfect information and on Skolemization, are mainly used in the definition of IF sentences only. The former generalizes a similar approach, for first-order logic, which was based instead on games of ''perfect'' information.
The third approach, ''team semantics'', is a compositional semantics in the spirit of Tarskian semantics. However, this semantics does not define what it means for a formula to be satisfied by an assignment (rather, by a ''set'' of assignments).
The first two approaches were developed in earlier publications on if logic; the third one by Hodges in 1997.
In this section, we differentiate the three approaches by writing distinct pedices, as in
. Since the three approaches are fundamentally equivalent, only the symbol
will be used in the rest of the article.
Game-Theoretical Semantics
Game-Theoretical Semantics assigns truth values to IF sentences according to the properties of some 2-player games of imperfect information.
For ease of presentation, it is convenient to associate games not only to sentences, but also to formulas. More precisely, one defines games
for each triple formed by an IF formula
, a structure
, and an assignment
.
Players
The semantic game
has two players, called Eloise (or Verifier) and Abelard (or Falsifier).
Game rules
The allowed moves in the semantic game
are determined by the synctactical structure of the formula under consideration.
For simplicity, we first assume that
is in negation normal form, with negations symbols occurring only in front of atomic subformulas.
# If
is a literal, the game ends, and, if
is true in
(in the first-order sense), then Eloise wins; otherwise, Abelard wins.
# If
, then Abelard chooses one of the subformulas
, and the corresponding game
is played.
# If
, then Eloises chooses one of the subformulas
, and the corresponding game
is played.
# If
, then Abelard chooses an element
of
, and game
is played.
# If
, then Eloise chooses an element
of
, and game
is played.
More generally, if
is not in negation normal form, we can state, as a rule for negation, that, when a game
is reached, the players begin playing a dual game
in which the roles of Verifiers and Falsifier are switched.
Histories
Informally, a sequence of moves in a game
is a history. At the end of each history
, some subgame
is played; we call
the ''assignment associated to''
, and
the ''subformula occurrence associated to''
. The ''player associated to''
is Eloise in case the most external logical operator in
is
or
, and Abelard in case it is
or
.
The set
of ''allowed moves'' in a history
is
if the most external operator of
is
or
; it is
(
being any two distinct objects, symbolizing 'left' and 'right') in case the most external operator of
is
or
.
Given two assignments
of same domain, and
we write
if
on any variable
.
Imperfect information is introduced in the games by stipulating that certain histories are indistinguishable for the associated player; indistinguishable histories are said to form an 'information set'. Intuitively, if the history
is in the information set
, the player associated to
does not know whether he is in
or in some other history of
.
Consider two histories
such that the associated
are identical subformula occurrences of the form
(
or
); if furthermore
, we write
(in case
) or
(in case
), in order to specify that the two histories are indistinguishable for Eloise, resp. for Abelard. We also stipulate, in general, reflexivity of this relation: if
, then
; and if
, then
.
Strategies
For a fixed game
, write
for the set of histories to which Eloise is associated, and similarly
for the set of histories of Abelard.
A ''strategy'' for Eloise in the game
is any function that assigns, to any possible history in which it is Eloise's turn to play, a legal move; more precisely, any function
such that
for every history
. One can define dually the strategies of Abelard.
A strategy for Eloise is ''uniform'' if, whenever
,
; for Abelard, if
implies
.
A strategy
for Eloise is ''winning'' if Eloise wins in each terminal history that can be reached by playing according to
. Similarly for Abelard.
Truth, falsity, indeterminacy
An IF sentence
is ''true'' in a structure
(
) if Eloise has a uniform winning strategy in the game
.
It is ''false'' (
) if Abelard has a winning strategy.
It is ''undetermined'' if neither Eloise nor Abelard has a winning strategy.
Conservativity
The semantics of IF logic thus defined is a conservative extension of first-order semantics, in the following sense. If
is an IF sentence with empty slash sets, associate to it the first-order formula
which is identical to it, except in that each IF quantifier
is replaced by the corresponding first-order quantifier
. Then
iff
in the Tarskian sense; and
iff
in the Tarskian sense.
Open formulas
More general games can be used to assign a meaning to (possibly open) IF formulas; more exactly, it is possible to define what it means for an IF formula
to be satisfied, on a structure
, by a ''team''
(a set of assignments of common variable domain
and codomain
).
The associated games
begin with the random choice of an assignment
; after this initial move, the game
is played. The existence of a winning strategy for Eloise defines ''positive satisfaction'' (
), and existence of a winning strategy for Abelard defines ''negative satisfaction'' (
).
At this level of generality, Game-theoretical Semantics can be replaced by an algebraic approach, ''team semantics'' (defined below).
Skolem Semantics
A definition of truth for IF sentences can be given, alternatively, by means of a translation into existential second-order logic. The translation generalizes the
Skolemization
In mathematical logic, a formula of first-order logic is in Skolem normal form if it is in prenex normal form with only universal first-order quantifiers.
Every first-order formula may be converted into Skolem normal form while not changing its ...
procedure of first-order logic. Falsity is defined by a dual procedure called Kreiselization.
Skolemization
Given an IF formula
, we first define its skolemization relativized to a finite set
of variables. For every existential quantifier
occurring in
, let
be a new function symbol (a "Skolem function"). We write
for the formula which is obtained substituting, in
, all free occurrences of the variable
with the term
. The Skolemization of
relative to
, denoted
, is defined by the following inductive clauses:
#
if
is a literal.
#
.
#
.
#
.
#
, where
is a list of the variables in
.
If
is an IF sentence, its (unrelativized) Skolemization is defined as
.
Kreiselization
Given an IF formula
, associate, to each universal quantifier
occurring in it, a new function symbol
(a "Kreisel function"). Then, the Kreiselization
of
relative to a finite set of variables
, is defined by the following inductive clauses:
#
if
is a literal.
#
.
#
.
#
, where
is a list of the variables in
.
#
If
is an IF sentence, its (unrelativized) Kreiselization is defined as
.
Truth, falsity, indeterminacy
Given an IF sentence
with
existential quantifiers, a structure
, and a list
of
functions of appropriate arities, we denote as
the expansion of
which assigns the functions
as interpretations for the Skolem functions of
.
An IF sentence is true on a structure
, written
, if there is a tuple
of functions such that
.
Similarly,
if there is a tuple
of functions such that
; and
iff neither of the previous conditions holds.
For any IF sentence, Skolem Semantics returns the same values as Game-theoretical Semantics.
Team Semantics
By means of team semantics, it is possible to give a
compositional account of the semantics of IF logic. Truth and falsity are grounded on the notion of 'satisfiability of a formula by a team'.
Teams
Let
be a
structure and let
be a finite set of variables. Then a team over
with domain
is a set of assignments over
with domain
, that is, a set of functions
from
to
.
Duplicating and supplementing teams
Duplicating and supplementing are two operations on teams which are related to the semantics of universal and existential quantification.
#Given a team
over a structure
and a variable
, the duplicating team