Almost Necessary

A formula is contingent if it is possibly true and possibly false. A formula is noncontingent if it is not contingent, i.e., if it is necessarily true or necessarily false. In an epistemic setting, ‘a formula is contingent’ means that you are ignorant about its value, whereas ‘a formula is non-contingent’ means that you know whether it is true. Although non-contingency is definable in terms of necessity as above, necessity is not always definable in terms of non-contingency, as studied in the literature. We propose an ‘almost-definability’ schema AD for non-contingency logic, the logic with the noncontingency operator as the only modality, making precise when necessity is definable with non-contingency. Based on AD we propose a notion of bisimulation for noncontingency logic, and characterize non-contingency logic as the (non-contingency) bisimulation invariant fragment of modal logic and of first-order logic. A known pain for non-contingency logic is the absence of axioms characterizing frame properties. This makes it harder to find axiomatizations of non-contingency logic over given frame classes. In particular, no axiomatization over symmetric frames is known, despite the rich results about non-contingency logic obtained in the literature since the 1960s. We demonstrate that the ‘almost-definability’ schema AD can guide our search for proper axioms for certain frame properties, and help us in defining the canonical models. Following this idea, as the main result, we give a complete axiomatization of non-contingency logic over symmetric frames.