-/- Provability logic is a modal logic that is used to investigate what arithmetical theories can express in a restricted language about their provability predicates. The logic has been inspired by developments in meta-mathematics such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems of 1931 and Löb’s theorem of 1953. As a modal logic, provability logic has been studied since the early seventies, and has had important applications in the foundations of mathematics. -/- From a philosophical point of view, provability logic is interesting because (...) the concept of provability in a fixed theory of arithmetic has a unique and non-problematic meaning, other than concepts like necessity and knowledge studied in modal and epistemic logic. Furthermore, provability logic provides tools to study the notion of self-reference. (shrink)

In this paper we carry out a comparative study of $\mathrm{I}\Sigma_1$ and PRA. We will in a sense fully determine what these theories have to say about each other in terms of provability and interpretability. Our study will result in two arithmetically complete modal logics with simple universal models.

The provability logic of a theory $T$ is the set of modal formulas, which under any arithmetical realization are provable in $T$. We slightly modify this notion by requiring the arithmetical realizations to come from a specified set $\Gamma$. We make an analogous modification for interpretability logics. We first study provability logics with restricted realizations and show that for various natural candidates of $T$ and restriction set $\Gamma$, the result is the logic of linear frames. However, for the theory Primitive (...) Recursive Arithmetic (PRA), we define a fragment that gives rise to a more interesting provability logic by capitalizing on the well-studied relationship between PRA and I$\Sigma_1$. We then study interpretability logics, obtaining upper bounds for IL(PRA), whose characterization remains a major open question in interpretability logic. Again this upper bound is closely related to linear frames. The technique is also applied to yield the nontrivial result that IL(PRA) $\subset$ ILM. (shrink)

For “natural enough” systems of ordinal notation we show that α times iterated local reflection schema over a sufficiently strong arithmetic T proves the same Π 1 0 -sentences as ω α times iterated consistency. A corollary is that the two hierarchies catch up modulo relative interpretability exactly at ε-numbers. We also derive the following more general “mixed” formulas estimating the consistency strength of iterated local reflection: for all ordinals α ⩾ 1 and all β, β ≡ Π 1 0 (...) T ω α · , α ≡ Π 1 0 T β + ω α . Here T α stands for α times iterated local reflection over T , T β stands for β times iterated consistency, and ≡ Π 1 0 denotes mutual Π 1 0 -conservativity. In an appendix to this paper we develop our notion of “natural enough” system of ordinal notation and show that such systems do exist for every recursive ordinal. (shrink)