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A multimodal logic is a
modal logic Modal logic is a collection of formal systems developed to represent statements about necessity and possibility. It plays a major role in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and natural language semantics. Modal logics extend other ...
that has more than one primitive modal operator. They find substantial applications in theoretical computer science.


Overview

A
modal logic Modal logic is a collection of formal systems developed to represent statements about necessity and possibility. It plays a major role in philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and natural language semantics. Modal logics extend other ...
with ''n'' primitive unary modal operators \Box_i, i\in \ is called an ''n''-modal logic. Given these operators and
negation In logic, negation, also called the logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P or \overline. It is interpreted intuitively as being true when P is false, and false ...
, one can always add \Diamond_i modal operators defined as \Diamond_i P if and only if \lnot \Box_i \lnot P. Perhaps the first substantive example of a two-modal logic is
Arthur Prior Arthur Norman Prior (4 December 1914 – 6 October 1969), usually cited as A. N. Prior, was a New Zealand–born logician and philosopher. Prior (1957) founded tense logic, now also known as temporal logic, and made important contributi ...
's tense logic, with two modalities, F and P, corresponding to "sometime in the future" and "sometime in the past". A logic with infinitely many modalities is dynamic logic, introduced by Vaughan Pratt in 1976 and having a separate modal operator for every regular expression. A version of temporal logic introduced in 1977 and intended for program verification has two modalities, corresponding to dynamic logic's 'A''and 'A''*modalities for a single program ''A'', understood as the whole universe taking one step forwards in time. The term ''multimodal logic'' itself was not introduced until 1980. Another example of a multimodal logic is the Hennessy–Milner logic, itself a fragment of the more expressive
modal μ-calculus In theoretical computer science, the modal μ-calculus (Lμ, Lμ, sometimes just μ-calculus, although this can have a more general meaning) is an extension of propositional modal logic (with many modalities) by adding the least fixed point opera ...
, which is also a
fixed-point logic In mathematical logic, fixed-point logics are extensions of classical predicate logic that have been introduced to express recursion. Their development has been motivated by descriptive complexity theory and their relationship to database query l ...
. Multimodal logic can be used also to formalize a kind of
knowledge representation Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...
: the motivation of epistemic logic is allowing several agents (they are regarded as
subject Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to: Philosophy *''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing **Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective cons ...
s capable of forming beliefs, knowledge); and managing the belief or knowledge of each agent, so that
epistemic Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...
assertions can be formed about them. The modal operator \Box must be capable of bookkeeping the cognition of each agent, thus \Box_i must be indexed on the set of the agents. The motivation is that \Box_i \alpha should assert "The subject ''i'' has knowledge about \alpha being true". But it can be used also for formalizing "the subject ''i'' believes \alpha". For formalization of meaning based on the possible world semantics approach, a multimodal generalization of Kripke semantics can be used: instead of a single "common" accessibility relation, there is a series of them indexed on the set of agents.Ferenczi 2002: 257


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External links

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer-reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely accessible to Internet users. It is maintained by Stanford University. Eac ...
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Modal logic
– by James Garson. {{logic-stub Modal logic