English

Goedel Logics: On the Elimination of The Absoluteness Operator

Logic in Computer Science 2026-05-07 v1

Abstract

We investigate the eliminability of the absoluteness operator Delta in Goedel logics. While Delta is not definable from the standard connectives and disrupts important proof-theoretic properties, we show that it becomes eliminable at the propositional level under a restricted semantics in which all propositional atoms (except the truth constant 'True') are interpreted strictly below 1. Under this semantics, every formula containing Delta is equivalent to a disjunction of chain formulas, yielding a Delta-free normal form (standard and restricted semantics coincide w.r.t. valid formulas without Delta). We further analyze the situation in the first-order setting, where Delta-elimination fails in general due to recursion-theoretic and topological constraints, but can be recovered under witnessed semantics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.05016,
  title  = {Goedel Logics: On the Elimination of The Absoluteness Operator},
  author = {Matthias Baaz and Mariami Gamsakhurdia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.05016},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

This research was funded in part by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) 10.55776/P36571