Product closure of some second-order modal logics

Abstract

Product update is an operation on models introduced into epistemic logic in order to represent a broad class of informational events. If adding modalities representing product update to a language does not alter its expressive power then we say that the language is "closed for product update." The basic modal language is known to be closed for product update. We establish that monadic second order logic is closed for product update (Theorem 5). Our technique is to pass via an intermediate language with what we call "action nominals." We obtain as corollaries that propositionally quantified modal logic is closed for product update, as is the modal mu-calculus.