We say that things happen accidentally when they do indeed happen, but only by chance. In the opposite situation, an essential happening is inescapable, its inevitability being the sine qua non for its very occurrence. This paper will investigate modal logics on a language tailored to talk about essential and accidental statements. Completeness of some among the weakest and the strongest such systems is attained. The weak expressibility of the classical propositional language enriched with the non-normal modal operators of essence (...) and accident is highlighted and illustrated, both with respect to the definability of the more usual modal operators as well as with respect to the characterizability of classes of frames. Several interesting problems and directions are left open for exploration. (shrink)

It will be an essential resource for philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, linguists, or any scholar who finds connectives, and the conceptual issues surrounding them, to be a source of interest.This landmark work offers both ...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the expressibility of classical propositional monomodal logics. To this end, a notion of embedding of one logic into another is introduced, which is a translation preserving theoremhood. Each translation trF is induced by a formula F of one variable p; it respects boolean connectives and translates a formula of a form □A into F). This notion enables to measure the expressibility of a logic by a number of logics embeddable into it. This (...) measure is calculated here for a large family of modal logics including K, K4, KB, K5, GL, GL.3, T, S4, B, S5, Grz, Grz.3, and provability logics. It is also shown that some of these logics are not embeddable into some others. (shrink)

This text aims to convey some of the interest and charm of modal logic, and to put a reader new to the subject in a position to have an informed opinion as to its applicability to each of several areas of philosophical concern in which the merits of a modal approach' have been controversial. he main focus, for these purposes, is on normal modal logics, though some attention is given to the non-normal side of the picture.