Extended abstract of a paper presented at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2007 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, August 5 – August 9, 2007

Ever since Cantor, we have known that the reals and the rationals are not isomorphic (as equality structures, i.e., sets). Logically speaking, however, they are not all that different; in first-order classical logic they are elementarily equivalent, since the theory of infinite sets is complete. The same holds for ℝ and ℚ as ordered sets; again the theory of dense linear order without end points is complete.

From an intuitionistic point of view these matters are more complicated; e.g., the theory of equality of ℚ is decidable, whereas the one of ℝ patently is not. This, in a roundabout way, shows that ℚ and ℝ are not isomorphic; of course, there is no need for such a detour, as Cantor's original proof [2] is intuitionistically correct, and Brouwer's new proof [1] is another alternative intuitionistic argument.

In view of the fact that ℚ and ℝ behave so strikingly differently with respect to first-order logic, one is easily tempted to look for elementary equivalences among the subsets of ℝ. Until quite recently most model theoretic investigations of intuitionistic theories made use of special (artificial) notions of “model”, e.g., Kripke models, sheaf models,…; but there is no prima facie reason why one should not practice model theory much the same way as traditional model theorists do. That is to say on the basis of a naive set theory, or, in our case, of naive intuitionistic mathematics.

This paper uses the method of (k, p)-isomorphisms of Fraïssé, and it is briefly shown that one half of the Fraïssé theorem holds intuitionistically.

Among the more traditional semantics for intuitionistic logic the Beth and the Kripke semantics seem well-suited for direct manipulations required for the derivation of metamathematical results. In particular Smoryński demonstrated the usefulness of Kripke models for the purpose of obtaining closure properties for first-order arithmetic, [S], and second-order arithmetic, [J-S]. Weinstein used similar techniques to handle intuitionistic analysis, [W]. Since, however, Beth-models seem to lend themselves better for dealing with analysis, cf. [D], we have developed a somewhat more liberal semantics, that shares the features of both Kripke and Beth semantics, in order to obtain analogues of Smoryński's collecting operations, which we will call Smoryński-glueing, in line with the categorical tradition.

The comprehension principle of second order arithmetic asserts the existence of certain species (sets) corresponding to properties of natural numbers. In the intuitionistic theory of sequences of natural numbers there is an analoguous principle, implicit in Brouwer's writing and explicitly stated by Kripke, which asserts the existence of certain sequences corresponding to statements. The justification of this principle, Kripke's Schema, makes use of the concept of the so-called creative subject. For more information the reader is referred to Troelstra [5].

Kripke's Schema reads

There is a weaker version

The idea to reduce species to sequences via Kripke's schema occurred several years ago (cf. [2, p. 128], [5, p. 104]). In [1] the reduction technique was applied in the construction of a model for HAS.

On second thought, however, I realized that there is a straightforward, simpler way to exploit Kripke's schema, avoiding models altogether. The idea to present this material separately was forced on the author by C. Smorynski.

Consider a second order arithmetic with both species and sequence variables. By KS we have

(for convenience we restrict ourselves in KS to 0-1-sequences). An application of AC-NF gives

Of course ξ is not uniquely determined. This is the key to the reduction of full second order arithmetic, or HAS, to a theory of sequences.

We now introduce a translation τ to eliminate species variables. It is no restriction to suppose that the formulae contain only the sequence variables ξ1, ξ3, ξ5, …

Note that by virtue of the definition of τ the axiom of extensionality is automatically verified after translation. The translation τ eliminates the species variables and leaves formulae without species variables invariant.