Fan Yang (University of Helsinki)
Title: Dependence logic and its axiomatization problem
Speaker's homepage
Dependence logic, introduced by Väänänen (2007), is a non-classical logic for reasoning about dependence and independence. The logic extends first-order logic with a new type of atomic formulas, called dependence atoms, to specify explicitly the dependence relation between variables. Dependence logic adopts an innovative semantics, called team semantics (Hodges 1997), in which formulas are evaluated on a model with respect to sets of assignments (called teams), instead of single assignments. Teams are essentially relations on the model. For this reason, dependence logic is equi-expressive with existential second-order logic, and thus not fully axiomatizable. In this talk, I will give a concise introduction to dependence logic, and I will also survey recent developments in finding partial axiomatizations for the logic.