Modal Translation of Substructural Logics

Abstract

In an article dating back in 1992, Kosta Došen initiated a project of modal translations in substructural logics, aiming at generalizing the well-known Gödel-McKinsey-Tarski translation of intuitionistic logic into {\bf S4}. Došen's translation worked well for (variants of) {\bf BCI} and stronger systems ({\bf BCW}, {\bf BCK}), but not for systems below {\bf BCI}. Dropping structural rules results in logic systems without distribution. In this article, we show, via translation, that every substructural (indeed, every non-distributive) logic is a fragment of a corresponding sorted, residuated (multi) modal logic. At the conceptual and philosophical level, the translation provides a classical interpretation of the meaning of the logical operators of various non-distributive propositional calculi. Technically, it allows for an effortless transfer of results, such as compactness, Löwenheim-Skolem property and decidability.