This paper is a presentation of astatus quæstionis, to wit of the problemof the interpretability logic of all reasonablearithmetical theories.We present both the arithmetical side and themodal side of the question.Dedicated to Dick de Jongh on the occasion of his 60th birthday.

This paper is an investigation into what could be a goodexplication of ``theory S is reducible to theory T''''. Ipresent an axiomatic approach to reducibility, which is developedmetamathematically and used to evaluate most of the definitionsof ``reducible'''' found in the relevant literature. Among these,relative interpretability turns out to be most convincing as ageneral reducibility concept, proof-theoreticalreducibility being its only serious competitor left. Thisrelation is analyzed in some detail, both from the point of viewof the reducibility axioms and of modal logic.

We investigate the modal logic of interpretability over Peano arithmetic. Our main result is a compactness theorem that extends the arithmetical completeness theorem for the interpretability logic ILMω. This extension concerns recursively enumerable sets of formulas of interpretability logic (rather than single formulas). As corollaries we obtain a uniform arithmetical completeness theorem for the interpretability logic ILM and a partial answer to a question of Orey from 1961. After some simplifications, we also obtain Shavrukov's embedding theorem for Magari algebras (a.k.a. (...) diagonalizable algebras). (shrink)

Hájek and Montagna proved that the modal propositional logic ILM is the logic of -conservativity over sound theories containing I (PA with induction restricted to formulas). I give a simpler proof of the same fact.

We investigate the modal logic of interpretability over Peano arithmetic. Our main result is a compactness theorem that extends the arithmetical completeness theorem for the interpretability logic ILM ω . This extension concerns recursively enumerable sets of formulas of interpretability logic (rather than single formulas). As corollaries we obtain a uniform arithmetical completeness theorem for the interpretability logic ILM and a partial answer to a question of Orey from 1961. After some simplifications, we also obtain Shavrukov's embedding theorem for Magari (...) algebras (a.k.a. diagonalizable algebras). (shrink)

If a formal theory T is able to reason about its own syntax, then the diagonalizable algebra of T is defined as its Lindenbaum sentence algebra endowed with a unary operator □ which sends a sentence φ to the sentence □φ asserting the provability of φ in T. We prove that the first order theories of diagonalizable algebras of a wide class of theories are undecidable and establish some related results.