English

There are no minimal effectively inseparable theories

Logic 2025-06-17 v3

Abstract

This paper belongs to the research on the limit of the first incompleteness theorem. Effectively inseparable theories (EI) can be viewed as an effective version of essentially undecidable theories (EU), and EI is stronger than EU. We examine the question: are there minimal effectively inseparable theories with respect to interpretability. We propose tEI, the theory version of EI. We first prove that there are no minimal tEI theories with respect to interpretability (i.e., for any tEI theory TT, we can effectively find a theory which is tEI and strictly weaker than TT with respect to interpretability). By a theorem due to Marian B. Pour-EI, we have tEI is equivalent with EI. Thus, there are no minimal EI theories with respect to interpretability. Also we prove that there are no minimal finitely axiomatizable EI theories with respect to interpretability.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.06190,
  title  = {There are no minimal effectively inseparable theories},
  author = {Yong Cheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.06190},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

To appear in Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 14 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T05:40:20.194Z