Modern modal logic originated as a branch of philosophical logic in which the concepts of necessity and possibility were investigated by means of a pair of dual operators that are added to a propositional or first-order language. The field owes much of its flavor and success to the introduction in the 1950s of the “possible-worlds” semantics in which the modal operators are interpreted via some “accessibility relation” connecting possible worlds. In subsequent years, modal logic has received attention as an attractive (...) approach towards formalizing such diverse notions as time, knowledge, or action. Nowadays, modal logics are applied in various disciplines, ranging from economics to linguistics and computer science. Consequently, there is by now a large variety of modal languages, with an even greater wealth of interpretations. For instance, many applications require a poly-modal framework consisting of a language with a family of modal operators and a semantics in which the corresponding accessibility relations are connected somehow. (shrink)

We discuss a `negative' way of defining frame classes in (multi)modal logic, and address the question of whether these classes can be axiomatized by derivation rules, the `non-ξ rules', styled after Gabbay's Irreflexivity Rule. The main result of this paper is a metatheorem on completeness, of the following kind: If Λ is a derivation system having a set of axioms that are special Sahlqvist formulas and Λ+ is the extension of Λ with a set of non-ξ rules, then Λ+ is (...) strongly sound and complete with respect to the class of frames determined by the axioms and the rules. (shrink)