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The metatheory of the classical propositional calculus is not axiomatizable

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2014

Ian Mason
Ian Mason*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305
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Extract

In this paper we investigate the first order metatheory of the classical propositional logic. In the first section we prove that the first order metatheory of the classical propositional logic is undecidable. Thus as a mathematical object even the simplest of logics is, from a logical standpoint, quite complex. In fact it is of the same complexity as true first order number theory.

This result answers negatively a question of J. F. A. K. van Benthem (see [van Benthem and Doets 1983]) as to whether the interpolation theorem in some sense completes the metatheory of the calculus. Let us begin by motivating the question that we answer. In [van Benthem and Doets 1983] it is claimed that a folklore prejudice has it that interpolation was the final elementary property of first order logic to be discovered. Even though other properties of the propositional calculus have been discovered since Craig's orginal paper [Craig 1957] (see for example [Reznikoff 1965]) there is a lot of evidence for the fundamental nature of the property. In abstract model theory for example one finds that very few logics have the interpolation property. There are two well-known open problems in this area. These are

1. Is there a logic satisfying the full compactness theorem as well as the interpolation theorem that is not equivalent to first order logic even for finite models?

2. Is there a logic stronger than L(Q), the logic with the quantifierthere exist uncountably many, that is countably compact and has the interpolation property?

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Symbolic Logic , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 451 - 457
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 1985

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References

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