Modal Logic

Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science

by Patrick Blackburn, Maarten de Rijke, Yde Venema

This modern, advanced textbook reviews modal logic, a field which caught the attention of computer scientists in the late 1970's. The development is mathematical; prior acquaintance with first-order logic and its semantics is assumed, and familiarity with the basic mathematical notions of set theory is required. The authors focus on the use of modal languages as tools to analyze the properties of relational structures, including their algorithmic and algebraic aspects. Applications to issues in logic and computer science such as completeness, computability and complexity are considered.

Genres: Logic, Philosophy, Mathematics, Computer Science

578 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 2001

Reviews

[Saeede Kermani · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was written detailed and was easy to follow(even for self-study). First four chapters give very good sight about modal logic. Chapter six wasn't as well as the previous chapters but it was understandable.
Recommend it for people who are interested in modal logic.

[Jooseppi Räikkönen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite heavy though thorough introduction to modal logic and some important aspects of its metatheory. Personally have to do quite a lot of work with the proofs as they aren't written out step by step, but the variety and extent of the material covered is impressive. I will definitely return to this really often.

[Wanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I spent many hours poring over this book to provide a more firm theoretical basis for my thesis work (in concert with the Handbook of Modal Logic), and was impressed with the clarity with which very deep model-theoretic results were presented. Some of the stated theorems (of particular interest to me were given in chapter 6) could have done with at least a proof sketch, or some reference as to where the full result was proved.