Related papers: Teasing apart definitional equivalence
In a recent paper, Kaye and Wong proved the following result, which they considered to belong to the folklore of mathematical logic. THEOREM: The first-order theories of Peano arithmetic and ZF with the axiom of infinity negated are…
Two salient notions of sameness of theories are synonymy, also known as definitional equivalence, and bi-interpretability. Of these two definitional equivalence is the strictest notion. In which cases can we infer synonymy from…
In contrast to the robust mutual interpretability phenomenon in set theory, Ali Enayat proved that bi-interpretation is absent: distinct theories extending ZF are never bi-interpretable and models of ZF are bi-interpretable only when they…
This paper aims to provide an analysis of what it means when we say that a pair of theories, very generously construed, are equivalent in the sense that they are interdefinable. With regard to theories articulated in first order logic, we…
A theory T is tight if different deductively closed extensions of T (in the same language) cannot be bi-interpretable. Many well-studied foundational theories are tight, including PA [Visser2006], ZF, Z2, and KM [enayat2017]. In this…
We make explicit the correspondence between syntax and syntactic categories for coherent first-order logic, providing a categorical characterization of bi-interpretability. This is done by creating a biequivalence between a bicategory of…
Given a countable transitive model of set theory and a partial order contained in it, there is a natural countable Borel equivalence relation on generic filters over the model; two are equivalent if they yield the same generic extension. We…
I argue that, on a judicious reading of two existing criteria--one syntactic and the other semantic--dual theories can be taken to be empirically equivalent. The judicious reading is straightforward, but leads to the surprising conclusion…
Hilary Putnam once suggested that "the actual existence of sets as 'intangible objects' suffers... from a generalization of a problem first pointed out by Paul Benacerraf... are sets a kind of function or are functions a sort of set?"…
We find that second order quantification is problematic when a quantified concept variable is supposed to function predicatively. This issue is analyzed and it is shown that a constructive interpretation of the falling under relation…
In this paper we study solution attempts for a problem posed by Ali Enayat: can there be a finitely axiomatized consistent sequential theory that interprets itself plus the (sentential or non-uniform) Tarski biconditionals? We provide a…
We consider the foundational relation between arithmetic and set theory. Our goal is to criticize the construction of standard arithmetic models as providing grounds for arithmetic truth (even in a relative sense). Our method is to…
We will prove bi-interpretability of the arithmetic $\N = \langle N, +,\cdot, 0, 1\rangle$ and the weak second order theory of $\N$ with the free monoid $\mathbb{M}_X$ of finite rank greater than 1 and with a non-trivial partially…
The main goal of this paper is to formulate a constructive analogue of Ackermann's observation about finite set theory and arithmetic. We will see that Heyting arithmetic is bi-interpretable with $\mathsf{CZF^{fin}}$, the finitary version…
Kristiansen and Murwanashyaka recently proved that Robinson arithmetic Q is interpretable in an elementary theory of full binary trees, T. We prove that, conversely, T is interpretable in Q by producing a formal interpretation of T in an…
Although the categorical arithmetic is not effectively axiomatizable, the belief that the incompleteness Theorems can be apply to it is fairly common. Furthermore, the so-called "essential" (or "inherent") semantic incompleteness of the…
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…
Louveau and Rosendal [5] have shown that the relation of bi-embeddability for countable graphs as well as for many other natural classes of countable structures is complete under Borel reducibility for analytic equivalence relations. This…
This paper describes an axiomatic theory BT for constructive mathematics. BT has a predicative comprehension axiom for a countable number of set types and usual combinatorial operations. BT has intuitionistic logic, is consistent with…
Gurevich and Shelah have shown that Peano Arithmetic cannot be interpreted in the monadic second-order theory of short chains (hence, in the monadic second-order theory of the real line). We show here that it is consistent that there is no…