Tightness and solidity in fragments of Peano Arithmetic
Abstract
It was shown by Visser that Peano Arithmetic has the property that any two bi-interpretable extensions of it (in the same language) are equivalent. Enayat proposed to refer to this property of a theory as tightness and to carry out a more systematic study of tightness and its stronger variants that he called neatness and solidity. Enayat proved that not only , but also and are solid. On the other hand, it was shown in later work by a number of authors that many natural proper fragments of those theories are not even tight. Enayat asked whether there is a proper solid subtheory of the theories listed above. We answer that question in the case of by proving that for every , there exist both a solid theory and a tight but not neat theory strictly between and . Moreover, the solid subtheories of can be required to be unable to interpret . We also obtain some other separations between properties related to tightness, for example by giving an example of a sequential theory that is neat but not semantically tight in the sense of Freire and Hamkins.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.09120,
title = {Tightness and solidity in fragments of Peano Arithmetic},
author = {Piotr Gruza and Leszek Aleksander Kołodziejczyk and Mateusz Łełyk},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.09120},
year = {2025}
}