Modal Logic as a Theory of Information
Johan Van Bentrem · 1997
Abstract The pioneering philosophical logicians of the 1950s and 1960s found that a modal logic of various intensional systems satisfying modem standards was a viable enterprise, as well as a philosophically enlightening one. Arthur Prior was a prominent contributor to this development, showing how a rigorous temporal logic could be developed which served initially for elucidating philosophical arguments involving the passage of Time, but later also became an instrument for linguistic analysis of the temporal system of natural languages. Around 1970 the resulting modal research programme also started acquiring a mathematical impetus of its own, and a flourishing literature on its model theory and proof theory developed in the decade afterwards. Most major results had been obtained here around 1980, and the main interest shifted to new applied areas, in particular, dynamic logic in computer science and provability logic in mathematics, that certainly had not been envisaged by the founding fathers.