Modal Logics that Bound the Circumference of Transitive Frames

Abstract

For each natural number $n$ we study the modal logic determined by the class of transitive Kripke frames in which there are no cycles of length greater than $n$ and no strictly ascending chains. The case $n=0$ is the G\"odel-L\"ob provability logic. Each logic is axiomatised by adding a single axiom to K4, and is shown to have the finite model property and be decidable. We then consider a number of extensions of these logics, including restricting to reflexive frames to obtain a corresponding sequence of extensions of S4. When $n=1$, this gives the famous logic of Grzegorczyk, known as S4Grz, which is the strongest modal companion to intuitionistic propositional logic. A topological semantic analysis shows that the $n$-th member of the sequence of extensions of S4 is the logic of hereditarily $n+1$-irresolvable spaces when the modality $\Diamond$ is interpreted as the topological closure operation. We also study the definability of this class of spaces under the interpretation of $\Diamond$ as the derived set (of limit points) operation. The variety of modal algebras validating the $n$-th logic is shown to be generated by the powerset algebras of the finite frames with cycle length bounded by $n$. Moreover each algebra in the variety is a model of the universal theory of the finite ones, and so is embeddable into an ultraproduct of them.