Adhesive and quasiadhesive categories provide a general framework for the study of algebraic graph rewriting systems. In a quasiadhesive category any two regular subobjects have a join which is again a regular subobject. Vice versa, if regular monos are adhesive, then the existence of a regular join for any pair of regular subobjects entails quasiadhesivity. It is also known (quasi)adhesive categories can be embedded in a Grothendieck topos via a functor preserving pullbacks and pushouts along (regular) monomorphisms. In this paper we extend these results to $\mathcal{M}, \mathcal{N}$-adhesive categories, a concept recently introduced to generalize the notion of (quasi)adhesivity. We introduce the notion of $\mathcal{N}$-adhesive morphism, which allows us to express $\mathcal{M}, \mathcal{N}$-adhesivity as a condition on the subobjects' posets. Moreover, $\mathcal{N}$-adhesive morphisms allows us to show how an $\mathcal{M},\mathcal{N}$-adhesive category can be embedded into a Grothendieck topos, preserving pullbacks and $\mathcal{M}, \mathcal{N}$-pushouts.

Many well-known logical identities are naturally written as equivalences between contextual formulas. A simple example is the Boole-Shannon expansion $c[p] \equiv (p \wedge c[\mathrm{true}] ) \vee (\neg\, p \wedge c[\mathrm{false}] )$, where $c$ denotes an arbitrary formula with possibly multiple occurrences of a "hole", called a context, and $c[\varphi]$ denotes the result of "filling" all holes of $c$ with the formula $\varphi$. Another example is the unfolding rule $\mu X. c[X] \equiv c[\mu X. c[X]]$ of the modal $\mu$-calculus. We consider the modal $\mu$-calculus as overarching temporal logic and, as usual, reduce the problem whether $\varphi_1 \equiv \varphi_2$ holds for contextual formulas $\varphi_1, \varphi_2$ to the problem whether $\varphi_1 \leftrightarrow \varphi_2$ is valid . We show that the problem whether a contextual formula of the $\mu$-calculus is valid for all contexts can be reduced to validity of ordinary formulas. Our first result constructs a canonical context such that a formula is valid for all contexts if{}f it is valid for this particular one. However, the ordinary formula is exponential in the nesting-depth of the context variables. In a second result we solve this problem, thus proving that validity of contextual formulas is EXP-complete, as for ordinary equivalences. We also prove that both results hold for CTL and LTL as well. We conclude the paper with some experimental results. In particular, we use our implementation to automatically prove the correctness of a set of six contextual equivalences of LTL recently introduced by Esparza et al. for the normalization of LTL formulas. While Esparza et al. need several pages of manual proof, our tool only needs milliseconds to do the job and to compute counterexamples for incorrect variants of the equivalences.

In this work we propose a formal system for fuzzy algebraic reasoning. The sequent calculus we define is based on two kinds of propositions, capturing equality and existence of terms as members of a fuzzy set. We provide a sound semantics for this calculus and show that there is a notion of free model for any theory in this system, allowing us (with some restrictions) to recover models as Eilenberg-Moore algebras for some monad. We will also prove a completeness result: a formula is derivable from a given theory if and only if it is satisfied by all models of the theory. Finally, leveraging results by Milius and Urbat, we give HSP-like characterizations of subcategories of algebras which are categories of models of particular kinds of theories.

Abstract Adhesive categoriesprovide an abstract framework for the algebraic approach to rewriting theory, where many general results can be recast and uniformly proved. However, checking that a model satisfies the adhesivity properties is sometimes far from immediate. In this paper we present a new criterion giving a sufficient condition for $$\mathcal {M},\mathcal {N}$$ M,N -adhesivity, a generalisation of the original notion of adhesivity. We apply it to several existing categories, and in particular tohierarchical graphs, a formalism that is notoriously difficult to fit in the mould of algebraic approaches to rewriting and for which various alternative definitions float around.

(Pre)closure spaces are a generalization of topological spaces covering also the notion of neighbourhood in discrete structures, widely used to model and reason about spatial aspects of distributed systems. In this paper we present an abstract theoretical framework for the systematic investigation of the logical aspects of closure spaces. To this end, we introduce the notion of closure (hyper)doctrines, i.e. doctrines endowed with inflationary operators (and subject to suitable conditions). The generality and effectiveness of this concept is witnessed by many examples arising naturally from topological spaces, fuzzy sets, algebraic structures, coalgebras, and covering at once also known cases such as Kripke frames and probabilistic frames (i.e., Markov chains). By leveraging general categorical constructions, we provide axiomatisations and sound and complete semantics for various fragments of logics for closure operators. Hence, closure hyperdoctrines are useful both for refining and improving the theory of existing spatial logics, and for the definition of new spatial logics for new applications.