Moment/history duality in Prior's logics of branching-time

Alberto Zanardo

pp. 483-507

in: Torben Brauner, Per V. Hasle, Peter Øhrstrøm (eds), The logic of time and modality, Synthese 150 (3), 2006.

Abstract

The basic notions in Prior’s Ockhamist and Peircean logics of branching-time are the notion of moment and that of history (or course of events). In the tree semantics, histories are defined as maximal linearly ordered sets of moments. In the geometrical approach, both moments and histories are primitive entities and there is no set theoretical (and ontological) dependency of the latter on the former. In the topological approach, moments can be defined as the elements of a rank 1 base of a non-Archimedean topology on the set of histories. In this paper, it will be shown that the topological approach, and hence the other approaches, can be reconstructed in a framework in which the basic notions are those of history and of relative closeness relation among histories.

Cited authors

Peirce Charles Sanders

Prior Arthur N