Modalities and multimodalities. With the assistance and collaboration of Juliana Bueno-Soler. (Q5962305)

This book is an amplified and revised version of the authors' [Modalità e multimodalità. Filosofia. Milano: FrancoAngeli (2001; Zbl 1015.03001)]. An important part of this revised work constitutes an introduction to standard topics in modal logic. There are other sections presenting valuable material not generally included in elementary textbooks on modal logic (apart, of course, from the authors' Italian version of this work). The book is written in a clear and agreeable style and useful exercises and references for further reading are given at the end of each chapter. There are frequent historical remarks regarding the development of modal logics, and philosophical issues related to some of these logics are presented. Due to all these features, the book is well suited for an introductory course in modal logic or as supplementary reading in an intermediate logic course. The standard topics presented in the book include propositional normal modal systems, possible worlds semantics, and first-order quantified modal logic with constant and variable domains. Completeness and soundness proofs for several of these systems are provided. As a complement to these results, the incompleteness of a normal modal system is proven. One chapter on epistemic logic and another on temporal logic are preparatory for what constitutes the most interesting novelty of this book: an introduction to multimodality, that is, the theory of logical systems having an arbitrary number of different primitive modal operators in their logical syntax. A general completeness proof for two sorts of multimodal logics is proven. Multimodality is also taken into account with respect to quantified modal logic but no completeness theorem is offered. Other topics covered in the book are matrices for modal logic and Dugundji's theorem, correspondence and bisimulation, the finite model property and filtration, and second-order propositional quantification.