Consider those structures that consist of a countable universe and a finite number of predicates and functions. Let = ‹∣∣, P1, …, Pn, f1, …, fm› be such a structure. We will restrict our consideration to structures, , whose universe, ∣∣, is a set of natural numbers, and thus we will be able to apply the notions of recursion theory to structures. Using deg(S) to refer to the degree of unsolvability of a set S, we can assign a degree of unsolvability to the structure by defining deg() to be the least upper bound of the degrees of the universe, predicates, and functions of . If we view as a presentation of the class of all structures which are isomorphic to (in the usual sense), then the deg() can be called the degree of the presentation.

While deg() is a natural degree to assign to the structure , it is not the only possibility. Indeed since a structure may have isomorphic presentations with different degrees, deg() has the deficiency of not being isomorphically invariant. We can assign degrees to some (but not all) structures in an isomorphically invariant fashion by looking at the class of the degrees of all presentations isomorphic to . If this class of degrees has a least element, we define it to be the degree of the isomorphism class of which we write deg([]).