Ultrafilter Extensions for Coalgebras

Abstract

This paper studies finitary modal logics as specification languages for Set-coalgebras (coalgebras on the category of sets) using Stone duality. It is well-known that Set-coalgebras are not semantically adequate for finitary modal logics in the sense that bisimilarity does not in general coincide with logical equivalence. Stone-coalgebras (coalgebras over the category of Stone spaces), on the other hand, do provide an adequate semantics for finitary modal logics. This leads us to study the relationship of finitary modal logics and Set-coalgebras by uncovering the relationship between Set-coalgebras and Stone-coalgebras. This builds on a long tradition in modal logic, where one studies canonical extensions of modal algebras and ultrafilter extensions of Kripke frames to account for finitary logics. Our main contributions are the generalisations of two classical theorems in modal logic to coalgebras, namely the Jónsson-Tarski theorem giving a set-theoretic representation for each modal algebra and the bisimulation-somewhere-else theorem stating that two states of a coalgebra have the same (finitary modal) theory iff they are bisimilar (or behaviourally equivalent) in the ultrafilter extension of the coalgebra.