Axiomatic theories of supervaluational truth: completing the picture

TL;DR

This paper develops and analyzes new axiomatic supervaluational theories of truth, extending Cantini's VF system to include additional schemes and variants, and explores their proof-theoretic strengths and relationships.

Contribution

It introduces axiomatic theories VF$^-$ and VFM for supervaluational schemes, analyzes their proof-theoretic strength, and proposes variants VFW and a schematic extension, connecting them to known logical systems.

Findings

VF$^-$ is as strong as VF.

VFM's strength is comparable to KF.

VFW matches the strength of predicative analysis.

Abstract

Supervaluational fixed-point theories of formal truth aim to amend an important shortcoming of fixed-point theories based on the Strong Kleene logic, namely, accounting for the truth of classical validities. In a celebrated paper, Andrea Cantini proposed an axiomatization of one such supervaluational theory of truth, which he called VF, and which proved to be incredibly strong proof-theoretically speaking. However, VF only axiomatizes one in a collection of several supervaluational schemes, namely the scheme which requires truth to be consistent. In this paper, we provide axiomatic theories for the remaining supervaluational schemes, labelling these systems VF$^-$ (for the theory which drops the consistency requirement), and VFM (for the theory which requires not only consistency but also completeness, i.e., maximal consistency). We then carry out proof-theoretic analyses of both theories. Our results show that VF$^-$ is as strong as VF, but that VFM's strength decreases significantly, being only as strong as the well-known theory KF. Furthermore, we introduce and analyse proof-theoretically two variants of these theories: the schematic extension, in the sense of Feferman, of VFM; and a theory in-between VFM and VF, that we call VFW, and which drops the assumption of maximal consistency. The former is shown to match the strength of predicative analysis; for the latter, we show its proof-theoretical equivalence with ramified analysis up to the ordinal $\varphi_20$, thus standing halfway between VFM and VF.