Inference from Visible Information and Background Knowledge

We provide a wide-ranging study of the scenario where a subset of the relations in a relational vocabulary is visible to a user—that is, their complete contents are known—while the remaining relations are invisible. We also have a background theory—invariants given by logical sentences—that may relate the visible relations to invisible ones, and also may constrain both the visible and invisible relations in isolation. We want to determine whether some other information, given as a positive existential formula, can be inferred using only the visible information and the background theory. This formula whose inference we are concerned with is denoted as the query . We consider whether positive information about the query can be inferred, and also whether negative information—the sentence does not hold—can be inferred. We further consider both the instance-level version of the problem, where both the query and the visible instance are given, and the schema-level version, where we want to know whether truth or falsity of the query can be inferred in some instance of the schema.

Uniform model-completeness for the real field expanded by power functions

We prove that given any first order formula ϕ in the language L′ = {+, ·, <,(fi)iЄI, (ci)iЄI}, where the fi are unary function symbols and the ci are constants, one can find an existential formula Ψ such that φ and Ψ are equivalent in any L′-structure

On regular reduced products

Assume (ℵ0, ℵ1) → (λ, λ+). Assume M is a model of a first order theory T of cardinality at most λ+ in a language of cardinality ≤ λ. Let N be a model with the same language. Let Δ be a set of first order formulas in and let D be a regular filter on λ. Then M is Δ-embeddable into the reduced power Nλ/D, provided that every Δ-existential formula true in M is true also in N. We obtain the following corollary: for M as above and D a regular ultrafilter over λ, Mλ/D is λ++-universal. Our second result is as follows: For i < μ let Mi, and Ni, be elementarily equivalent models of a language which has cardinality ≤ λ. Suppose D is a regular filter on λ and (ℵ0, ℵ1) → (λ, λ+) holds. We show that then the second player has a winning strategy in the Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé game of length λ+ on ΠiMi/D and ΠiNi/D. This yields the following corollary: Assume GCH and λ regular (or just (ℵ0, ℵ1) → (λ, λ+) and 2λ = λ+. For L, Mi and Ni be as above, if D is a regular filter on λ, then ΠiMi/D ≅ ΠiNi/D.

On the elementary theory of restricted elementary functions

As a contribution to definability theory in the spirit of Tarski's classical work on (R, <, 0, 1, +, ·) we extend here part of his results to the structureHere exp ∣[0, 1] and sin ∣[0, π] are the restrictions of the exponential and sine function to the closed intervals indicated; formally we identify these restricted functions with their graphs and regard these as binary relations on R. The superscript “RE” stands for “restricted elementary” since, given any elementary function, one can in general only define certain restrictions of it in RRE.Let (RRE, constants) be the expansion of RRE obtained by adding a name for each real number to the language. We can now formulate our main result as follows.Theorem. (RRE, constants) is strongly model-complete.This means that every formula ϕ(X1, …, Xm) in the natural language of (RRE, constants) is equivalent to an existential formulawith the extra property that for each x ∈ Rm such that ϕ(x) is true in RRE there is exactly one y ∈ Rn such that ψ(x, y) is true in RRE. (Here ψ is quantifier free.)

The ideal structure of existentially closed algebras

Throughout this paper, ⊿ will denote a commutative ring with multiplicative identity, 1. The algebras we consider will be associative ⊿-algebras which are not necessarily commutative and do not necessarily contain a multiplicative identity. By standard methods, every ⊿-algebra can be embedded in an existentially closed (e.c.) Δ-algebra—and even in one which is existentially universal (e.u.). (See §0 for more details.)We shall be studying the ideals of e.c. ⊿-algebras. Since every ideal is a sum of principal ideals, a natural place to begin is with principal ideals. In §1 we show that for an algebraically closed (a.c.) ⊿-algebra A, and elements a, b in A, whether or not b belongs to the principal ideal (a)A generated by a, depends only on the underlying ⊿-module structure of A; more precisely, for b to belong to (a)A it is necessary and sufficient that b satisfies every positive existential formula θ(ν) in the language of ⊿-modules which is satisfied by a (cf. Corollary 1.8). For special classes of rings ⊿ this condition can be simplified (Proposition 1.10): e.g. for Prüfer rings it is enough to consider formulas of the form ∃x(λx = μν); and for regular rings it is enough to consider formulas μν = 0 (where λ, μ ∈ ⊿).In §2 we use the results of §1 to study e.c. and e.u. algebras over a principal ideal domain (p.i.d.) ⊿ (Note that for ⊿ = Z this includes the case of e.c. rings.) We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for an a.c. ⊿-algebra to be e.c. (Theorem 2.4). We also show (Theorem 2.2) that in an a.c. ⊿-algebra A every element that is divisible by all nonzero elements of ⊿ belongs to the divisible part D(A) of A. (It should be noted that, while a.c. ⊿-modules are always divisible [ES], an e.c. ⊿-algebra is never divisible: see the end of §0. Moreover, an e.c. ⊿-algebra always contains torsion-free elements: see Remark 2.3.) We prove that every bounded ideal in an a.c. ⊿-algebra is principal (2.7).

Examples in the theory of existential completeness

Since A. Robinson introduced the classes of existentially complete and generic models, conditions which were interesting for elementary classes were considered for these classes. In [6] H. Simmons showed that with the natural definitions there are prime and saturated existentially complete models and these are very similar to their elementary counterparts which were introduced by Vaught [2, 2.3]. As Example 6 will show, there is a limit to the similarity—there are theories which have exactly two existentially complete models.In [6] H. Simmons considers the following list of properties, shows that each property implies the next one and asks whether any of them implies the previous one:1.1. T is ℵ0-categorical.1.2. T has an ℵ0-categorical model companion.1.3. ∣E∣ = 1.1.4. ∣E∣ < .1.5. T has a countable ∃-saturated model.1.6. T has a ∃-prime model.1.7. Each universal formula is implied by a ∃-atomic existential formula.[The reader is referred to [1], [3], [4] and [6] for the definitions and background.We only mention that T is always a countable theory. All the models under discussion are countable. Thus E is the class of countable existentially complete models and F and G, respectively, are the classes of countable finite and infinite generic models. For every class C,∣C∣ is the number of (countable) models in C.]