Title: Suszko's Problem: Mixed Consequence and Compositionality,
Abstract: Suszko's problem is the problem of finding the minimal number of truth values
needed to semantically characterize a syntactic consequence relation. Suszko
proved that every Tarskian consequence relation can be characterized using only
two truth values. Malinowski showed that this number can equal three if some of
Tarski's structural constraints are relaxed. By so doing, Malinowski introduced
a case of so-called mixed consequence, allowing the notion of a designated
value to vary between the premises and the conclusions of an argument. In this
paper we give a more systematic perspective on Suszko's problem and on mixed
consequence. First, we prove general representation theorems relating
structural properties of a consequence relation to their semantic
interpretation, uncovering the semantic counterpart of substitution-invariance,
and establishing that (intersective) mixed consequence is fundamentally the
semantic counterpart of the structural property of monotonicity. We use those
to derive maximum-rank results proved recently in a different setting by French
and Ripley, as well as by Blasio, Marcos and Wansing, for logics with various
structural properties (reflexivity, transitivity, none, or both). We strengthen
these results into exact rank results for non-permeable logics (roughly, those
which distinguish the role of premises and conclusions). We discuss the
underlying notion of rank, and the associated reduction proposed independently
by Scott and Suszko. As emphasized by Suszko, that reduction fails to preserve
compositionality in general, meaning that the resulting semantics is no longer
truth-functional. We propose a modification of that notion of reduction,
allowing us to prove that over compact logics with what we call regular
connectives, rank results are maintained even if we request the preservation of
truth-functionality and additional semantic properties.