Combining fragments of classical logic: When are interaction principles needed?

Abstract: We investigate the combination of fragments of classical logic as a way of conservatively extending a given Boolean logic by the addition of new connectives, and we precisely characterize the circumstances in which such a combination produces the corresponding fragment of classical logic over the signature containing connectives from both fragments given as input. If the thereby produced combined fragment is only incompletely characterized by the components given as input, this means that connectives from one component need to interact with connectives from the other component, giving rise to interaction principles. The main contributions strongly rely on the (well-known) description of the 2-valued clones made by Post, on the (not so well-known) axiomatization procedures for 2-valued matrices laid out by Rautenberg, and on Avron's non-deterministic matrices, which have (recently) been used to produce a significant advance on the understanding of the semantics of fibring.