Monadic second order logic as the model companion of temporal logic

The main focus of this paper is on bisimulation-invariant MSO, and more particularly on giving a novel model-theoretic approach to it. In model theory, a model companion of a theory is a first-order description of the class of models in which all potentially solvable systems of equations and non-equations have solutions. We show that bisimulation-invariant MSO on trees gives the model companion for a new temporal logic, “fair CTL”, an enrichment of CTL with local fairness constraints. To achieve this, we give a completeness proof for the logic fair CTL which combines tableaux and Stone duality, and a fair CTL encoding of the automata for the modal μ-calculus. Moreover, we also show that MSO on binary trees is the model companion of binary deterministic fair CTL.