A Duplication and Loop Checking Free System for S4

Most of the sequent/tableau based proof systems for the modal logic S4 need to duplicate formulas and thus are required to adopt some method of loop checking. In what follows we present a tableau-like proof system for S4, based on D'Agostino and Mondadori's classical KE, which is free of duplication and loop checking. The key feature of this system (let us call it KES4) consists in its use of (i) a label formalism which models the semantics of the modal operators according to the usual conditions for S4; and (ii) a label unification scheme which tells us when two labels "denote" the same world in the S4-model(s) generated in the course of proof search. Moreover, it uses special closure conditions to check models for putative contradictions.