Quantifying over Boolean announcements

Abstract

Various extensions of public announcement logic have been proposed with quantification over announcements. The best-known extension is called arbitrary public announcement logic, APAL. It contains a primitive language construct Box phi intuitively expressing that "after every public announcement of a formula, formula phi is true". The logic APAL is undecidable and it has an infinitary axiomatization. Now consider restricting the APAL quantification to public announcements of Boolean formulas only, such that Box phi intuitively expresses that "after every public announcement of a Boolean formula, formula phi is true". This logic can therefore called Boolean arbitrary public announcement logic, BAPAL. The logic BAPAL is the subject of this work. Unlike APAL it has a finitary axiomatization. Also, BAPAL is not at least as expressive as APAL. A further claim that BAPAL is decidable is deferred to a companion paper.

Keywords

• computer science - logic in computer science
• computer science - computational complexity