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Negative-existentially complete structures and definability in free extensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2014

Volker Weispfenning
Volker Weispfenning*
Affiliation:
Universität Heidelberg, 6900 Heidelberg 1, West Germany
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Let R be a commutative ring with 1 and R[X 1, …, Xn ] the polynomial ring in n variables over R. Then for any relation f(X) = 0 in R[X] there exists a conjunction of equations φf such that f(X) = 0 holds in R[X] iff φf holds in R; φf is of course the formula saying that all the coefficients of f(X) vanish. Moreover, φf is independent of R and formed uniformly for all polynomials f up to a given formal degree. In this paper we investigate first order theories T for which a similar phenomenon holds. More precisely, we let TAH be the universal Horn part of a theory T and look at free extensions of models of T in the class of models of TAH . We ask whether an atomic relation t 1(X, a) = t 2(X, a) or R(t 1(X, a), …, tn (X, a)) in can be equivalently expressed by a finite or infinitary formula φ(a) in , such that φ(y) depends only on t i{X, y) and not on or a 1, …, am ∈ A.

We will show that for a wide class of theories T “defining formulas” φ(y) in this sense exist and can be taken as infinite disjunctions of positive existential formulas.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Symbolic Logic , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , March 1976, pp. 95 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 1976

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References

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