Provability and interpretability logics with restricted realizations

Thomas F. Icard, Joost J. Joosten

Published 2020-06-18Version 1

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. This is a paper from 2012. We first studied provability logics with restricted realizations, and show that for various natural candidates of theory T and restriction set $\Gamma$, where each sentence in $\Gamma$ has a well understood (meta)-mathematical content in T, 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 some upper bounds for IL(PRA), whose characterization remains a major open question in interpretability logic. Again this upper bound is closely relatively to linear frames. The technique is also applied to yield the non-trivial result that IL(PRA) $\subset$ ILM.