NEW FOUNDATIONS OF REASONING VIA REAL-VALUED FIRST-ORDER LOGICS

Abstract Many-valued logics, in general, and real-valued logics, in particular, usually focus on a notion of consequence based on preservation of full truth, typically represented by the value $1$ in the semantics given in the real unit interval $[0,1]$ . In a recent paper [Foundations of Reasoning with Uncertainty via Real-valued Logics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121(21): e2309905121, 2024], Ronald Fagin, Ryan Riegel, and Alexander Gray have introduced a new paradigm that allows to deal with inferences in propositional real-valued logics based on a rich class of sentences, multi-dimensional sentences, that talk about combinations of any possible truth values of real-valued formulas. They have proved a strong completeness result that allows one to derive exactly what information can be inferred about the combinations of truth values of a collection of formulas given information about the combinations of truth values of a finite number of other collections of formulas. In this paper, we extend that work to the first-order (as well as modal) logic of multi-dimensional sentences. We give a parameterized axiomatic system that covers any reasonable logic and prove a corresponding completeness theorem, first assuming that the structures are defined over a fixed domain, and later for the logics of varying domains. As a by-product, we also obtain a zero-one law for finitely-valued versions of these logics. Since several first-order real-valued logics are known not to have recursive axiomatizations but only infinitary ones, our system is by force akin to infinitary systems.