This thesis is part of a line of research aimed at providing a strong and modular mathematical backbone to a wide and inherently diverse class of logics, introduced to capture different facets of social behaviour. The contributions of this thesis are rooted methodologically in duality, algebraic logic and structural proof theory, pertain to and advance three theories (unified correspondence, multi-type calculi, and updates on algebras) aimed at improving the semantic and proof-theoretic environment of wide classes of logics, and apply these theories to the introduction of logical frameworks specifically designed to capture concrete aspects of social behaviour, such as agents’ coordination and planning concerning the transformation and use of resources, and agents’ decision-making under uncertainty. The results of this thesis include: the characterization of the axiomatic extensions of the basic DLE-logics which admit proper display calculi; an algorithm computing the analytic structural rules capturing these axiomatic extensions; the introduction of a multi-type environment to describe and reason about agents’ abilities and capabilities to use and transform resources; the introduction of a proper display calculus for firstorder logic; the introduction of the intuitionistic counterpart of Probabilistic Dynamic Epistemic Logic, specifically designed to address situations in which truth is socially constructed. The results and methodologies developed in this thesis pave the way to the logical modelling of the inner workings of organizations and their dynamics, and of social phenomena such as reputational Matthew effects and bank runs. @en

We introduce the logic LRC, designed to describe and reason about agents’ abilities and capabilities in using resources. The proposed framework bridges two—up to now—mutually independent strands of literature: the one on logics of abilities and capabilities, developed within the theory of agency, and the one on logics of resources, motivated by program semantics. The logic LRC is suitable to describe and reason about key aspects of social behaviour in organizations. We prove a number of properties enjoyed by LRC (soundness, completeness, canonicity, and disjunction property) and its associated analytic calculus (conservativity, cut elimination, and subformula property). These results lay at the intersection of the algebraic theory of unified correspondence and the theory of multitype calculi in structural proof theory. Case studies are discussed which showcase several ways in which this framework can be extended and enriched while retaining its basic properties, so as to model an array of issues, both practically and theoretically relevant, spanning from planning problems to the logical foundations of the theory of organizations.

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Categorization systems are widely studied in psychology, sociology, and organization theory as information-structuring devices which are critical to decision-making processes. In the present paper, we introduce a sound and complete epistemic logic of categories and agents' categorical perception. The Kripke-style semantics of this logic is given in terms of data structures based on two domains: one domain representing objects (e.g. market products) and one domain representing the features of the objects which are relevant to the agents' decision-making. We use this framework to discuss and propose logic-based formalizations of some core concepts from psychological, sociological, and organizational research in categorization theory.

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RS-frames were introduced by Gehrke as relational semantics for substructural logics. They are two-sorted structures, based on RS-polarities with additional relations used to interpret modalities. We propose an intuitive, epistemic interpretation of RS-frames for modal logic, in terms of categorization systems and agents’ subjective interpretations of these systems. Categorization systems are a key to any decision-making process and are widely studied in the social and management sciences. A set of objects together with a set of properties and an incidence relation connecting objects with their properties forms a polarity which can be ‘pruned’ into an RS-polarity. Potential categories emerge as the Galois-stable sets of this polarity, just like the concepts of Formal Concept Analysis. An agent’s beliefs about objects and their properties (which might be partial) is modelled by a relation which gives rise to a normal modal operator expressing the agent’s beliefs about category membership. Fixed-points of the iterations of the belief modalities of all agents are used to model categories constructed through social interaction.

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The present article aims at establishing formal connections between correspondence phenomena, well known from the area of modal logic, and the theory of display calculi, originated by Belnap. These connections have been seminally observed and exploited by Marcus Kracht, in the context of his characterization of the modal axioms (which he calls primitive formulas) which can be effectively transformed into ‘analytic’ structural rules of display calculi. In this context, a rule is ‘analytic’ if adding it to a display calculus preserves Belnap’s cut-elimination theorem. In recent years, the state-of-the-art in correspondence theory has been uniformly extended from classical modal logic to diverse families of non-classical logics, ranging from (bi-)intuitionistic (modal) logics, linear, relevant and other substructural logics, to hybrid logics and mu-calculi. This generalization has given rise to a theory called unified correspondence, the most important technical tools of which are the algorithm ALBA, and the syntactic characterization of Sahlqvist-type classes of formulas and inequalities which is uniform in the setting of normal DLE-logics (logics the algebraic semantics of which is based on bounded distributive lattices). We apply unified correspondence theory, with its tools and insights, to extend Kracht’s results and prove his claims in the setting of DLE-logics. The results of the present article characterize the space of properly displayable DLE-logics. @en