Orthologic with Axioms

We study the proof theory and algorithms for orthologic, a logical system based on ortholattices, which have shown practical relevance in simplification and normalization of verification conditions. Ortholattices weaken Boolean algebras while having polynomial-time equivalence checking that is sound with respect to Boolean algebra semantics. We generalize ortholattice reasoning and obtain an algorithm for proving a larger class of classically valid formulas.

As the key result, we analyze a proof system for orthologic augmented with axioms. An important feature of the system is that it limits the number of formulas in a sequent to at most two, which makes the extension with axioms non-trivial. We show a generalized form of cut elimination for this system, which implies a sub-formula property. From there we derive a cubic-time algorithm for provability from axioms, or equivalently, for validity in finitely presented ortholattices. We further show that propositional resolution of width 5 proves all formulas provable in orthologic with axioms. We show that orthologic system subsumes resolution of width 2 and arbitrarily wide unit resolution and is complete for reasoning about generalizations of propositional Horn clauses.

Moving beyond ground axioms, we introduce effectively propositional orthologic (by analogy with EPR for classical logic), presenting its semantics as well as a sound and complete proof system. Our proof system implies the decidability of effectively propositional orthologic, as well as its fixed-parameter tractability for a bounded maximal number of variables in each axiom. As a special case, we obtain a generalization of Datalog with negation and disjunction.