Epistemic modals have peculiar logical features that are challenging to account for in a broadly classical framework. For instance, while a sentence of the form $$p\wedge \Diamond \lnot p$$ (‘p, but it might be that not p’) appears to be a contradiction, $$\Diamond \lnot p$$ does not entail $$\lnot p$$, which would follow in classical logic. Likewise, the classical laws of distributivity and disjunctive syllogism fail for epistemic modals. Existing attempts to account for these facts generally either under- or over-correct. (...) Some theories predict that $$ p\wedge \Diamond \lnot p$$, a so-called epistemic contradiction, is a contradiction only in an etiolated sense, under a notion of entailment that does not always allow us to replace $$p\wedge \Diamond \lnot p$$ with a contradiction; these theories underpredict the infelicity of embedded epistemic contradictions. Other theories savage classical logic, eliminating not just rules that intuitively fail, like distributivity and disjunctive syllogism, but also rules like non-contradiction, excluded middle, De Morgan’s laws, and disjunction introduction, which intuitively remain valid for epistemic modals. In this paper, we aim for a middle ground, developing a semantics and logic for epistemic modals that makes epistemic contradictions genuine contradictions and that invalidates distributivity and disjunctive syllogism but that otherwise preserves classical laws that intuitively remain valid. We start with an algebraic semantics, based on ortholattices instead of Boolean algebras, and then propose a possibility semantics, based on partial possibilities related by compatibility. Both semantics yield the same consequence relation, which we axiomatize. We then show how to lift an arbitrary possible worlds model for a non-modal language to a possibility model for a language with epistemic modals. The goal throughout is to retain what is desirable about classical logic while accounting for the non-classicality of epistemic vocabulary. (shrink)

A sequent calculus for the positive fragment of entailment together with the Church constants is introduced here. The single cut rule is admissible in this consecution calculus. A topological dual gaggle semantics is developed for the logic. The category of the topological structures for the logic with frame morphisms is proven to be the dual category of the variety, that is defined by the equations of the algebra of the logic, with homomorphisms. The duality results are extended to the logic (...) of entailment that includes a De Morgan negation. (shrink)

Constructive dualities have recently been proposed for some lattice-based algebras and a related project has been outlined by Holliday and Bezhanishvili, aiming at obtaining “choice-free spatial dualities for other classes of algebras [ $$\ldots $$ ], giving rise to choice-free completeness proofs for non-classical logics”. We present in this article a way to complete the Holliday–Bezhanishvili project (uniformly, for any normal lattice expansion). This is done by recasting in a choice-free manner recent relational representation and duality results by the author. (...) These results addressed the general representation and duality problem for lattices with quasi-operators, extending the Jónsson–Tarski approach for BAOs, and Dunn’s follow-up approach for distributive generalized Galois logics, to contexts where distributivity may not be assumed. To illustrate, we apply the framework to lattices (and their logics) with some form or other of a (quasi)complementation operator, obtaining correspondence results and canonical extensions in relational frames and choice-free dualities for lattices with a minimal, or a Galois quasi-complement, or involutive lattices, including De Morgan algebras, as well as Ortholattices and Boolean algebras, as special cases. (shrink)