Three faces of recursion axioms: the case of constructive dynamic logic of relation changers

Abstract This paper proposes an intuitionistic generalization of van Benthem and Liu’s dynamic logic of relation changers, where relation changers are dynamic operators that rewrite each agent’s accessibility relation. We employ Nishimura’s Kripke semantics for a constructive propositional dynamic logic to define the semantics of relation changers. Strong completeness results of Hilbert-style axiomatizations for constructive dynamic logic of relation changers are established by two types of rewriting strategies via recursion axioms: inside-out and outside-in strategies. To establish the semantic completeness by outside-in strategy, we propose the notion of composition of relation changers and an appropriately defined notion of length of a formula. Moreover, we reveal that recursion axioms have additional two faces: semantic and proof-theoretic ones. As for the semantic face, we introduce an alternative semantics for dynamic logic of relation changers to specify the semantic meaning of recursion axioms used in the inside-out strategy. This leads us to a semantic completeness proof of the axiomatization for the original semantics, which does not require a rewriting strategy based on recursion axioms. As for the proof-theoretic face, we transform each of recursion axioms required in the outside-in strategy into two (left and right) inference rules to provide a sequent calculus for dynamic logic of relation changers. Since the resulting sequent calculus is cut-free but semi-analytic, it still enjoys the Craig interpolation theorem by Maehara’s method.