Expanding Belnap 2: the dual category in depth

Bilattices, which provide an algebraic tool for simultaneously modelling knowledge and truth, were introduced by N. D. Belnap in a 1977 paper entitled How a computer should think. Prioritised default bilattices include not only Belnap’s four values, for ‘true’ (𝒕), ‘false’( 𝒇 ), ‘contradiction’ (⊤) and ‘no information’ (⊥), but also indexed families of default values for simultaneously modelling degrees of knowledge and truth. Prioritised default bilattices have applications in a number of areas including artificial intelligence. In our companion paper, we introduced a new family of prioritised default bilattices, J𝑛, for 𝑛 ⩾ 0, with J0 being Belnap’s seminal example. We gave a duality for the variety V𝑛 generated by J𝑛, with the dual category X𝑛 consisting of multi-sorted topological structures. Here we study the dual category in depth. We axiomatise the category X𝑛 and show that it is isomorphic to a category Y𝑛 of single-sorted topological structures. The objects of Y𝑛 are ranked Priestley spaces endowed with a continuous retraction. We show how to construct the Priestley dual of the underlying bounded distributive lattice of an algebra in V𝑛 via its dual in Y𝑛; as an application we show that the size of the free algebra FV𝑛 (1) is given by a polynomial in 𝑛 of degree 6.