Maximality of bi-intuitionistic propositional logic

Abstract

In the style of Lindstr\"om's theorem for classical first-order logic, this article characterizes propositional bi-intuitionistic logic as the maximal (with respect to expressive power) abstract logic satisfying a certain form of compactness, the Tarski union property and preservation under bi-asimulations. Since bi-intuitionistic logic introduces new complexities in the intuitionistic setting by adding the analogue of a backwards looking modality, the present paper constitutes a non-trivial modification of previous work done by the authors for intuitionistic logic in: G. Badia and G. Olkhovikov. A Lindstr\"om theorem for intuitionistic propositional logic. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 61 (1): 11-30 (2020).