English

Tightness and solidity in fragments of Peano Arithmetic

Logic 2025-12-11 v1

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 PA\mathrm{PA}, but also ZF\mathrm{ZF} and Z2\mathrm{Z}_2 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 PA\mathrm{PA} by proving that for every nn, there exist both a solid theory and a tight but not neat theory strictly between IΣn\mathrm{I}\Sigma_{n} and PA\mathrm{PA}. Moreover, the solid subtheories of PA\mathrm{PA} can be required to be unable to interpret PA\mathrm{PA}. 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}
}