A First-Order Framework for Inquisitive Modal Logic

Abstract

We present a natural standard translation of inquisitive modal logic InqML into first-order logic over the natural two-sorted relational representations of the intended models, which captures the built-in higher-order features of InqML. This translation is based on a graded notion of flatness that ties the inherent second-order, team-semantic features of InqML over information states to subsets or tuples of bounded size. A natural notion of pseudo-models, which relaxes the non-elementary constraints on the intended models, gives rise to an elementary, purely model-theoretic proof of the compactness property for InqML. Moreover, we prove a Hennessy-Milner theorem for InqML, which crucially uses $\omega$-saturated pseudo-models and the new standard translation. As corollaries we also obtain van Benthem style characterisation theorems.