Abstract We study an early and neglected logical work of Avicenna from around the years AD 990–1000, known as Short Epitome in Logic. In this work Avicenna introduces a new form of hypothetical logic, based on the categorical syllogisms of Aristotle but with terms that are sentences rather than nouns. His reading of the sentences of this logic anticipates the ‘adverbs of quantification’ of David Lewis, and the design of the new logic is close to that of George Boole’s ‘theory of Secondary Propositions’.

We can use the compositional semantics of Hodges [9] to show that any compositional semantics for logics of imperfect information must obey certain constraints on the number of semantically inequivalent formulas. As a corollary, there is no compositional semantics for the ‘independence-friendly’ logic of Hintikka and Sandu (henceforth IF) in which the interpretation in a structure A of each 1 -ary formula is a subset of the domain of A (Corollary 6.2 below proves this and more). After a fashion, this rescues a claim of Hintikka and provides the proof which he lacked: … there is no realistic hope of formulating compositional truth-conditions for [sentences of IF], even though I have not given a strict impossibility proof to that effect. (Hintikka [6] page 110ff.) One curious spinoff is that there is a structure of cardinality 6 on which the logic of Hintikka and Sandu gives nearly eight million inequivalent formulas in one free variable (which is more than the population of Finland). We thank the referee for a sensible change of notation, and Joel Berman and Stan Burris for bringing us up to date with the computation of Dedekind's function (see section 4). Our own calculations, utterly trivial by comparison, were done with Maple V. The paper Hodges [9] (cf. [10]) gave a compositional semantics for a language with some devices of imperfect information. The language was complicated, because it allowed imperfect information both at quantifiers and at conjunctions and disjunctions.

Editorial Get access WILFRED HODGES WILFRED HODGES Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Logic and Computation, Volume 1, Issue 6, December 1991, Pages 757–759, https://doi.org/10.1093/logcom/1.6.757 Published: 01 December 1991

Any list of Alfred Tarski's achievements would mention his decision procedure for real-closed fields. He proved a number of other less publicized decidability results too. We shall survey these results. After surveying them we shall ask what Tarski had in mind when he proved them. Today our emphases and concepts are sometimes different from those of Tarski in the early 1930s. Some of these changes are the direct result of Tarski's own fundamental work in model theory during the intervening years. Tarski's work on decidable theories is important not just for the individual decidability theorems themselves. His method for all these decidability results was elimination of quantifiers, and he systematically used this method to prove a range of related theorems about completeness and definability. He also led several of his students to do important work using this same method. Tarski's use of quantifier elimination has had a deep and cumulative influence on model theory and the logical treatment of algebraic theories. We thank Solomon Feferman, Steven Givant, Haragauri Gupta, Yuri Gurevich. Angus Macintyre, Gregory Moore, Robert Vaught and the referee for helpful discussions and comments. Also we thank Madame Maria Mostowska and Roman Murawski for sending us material from Polish libraries.

Let A be an abelian group and B a pure injective pure extension of A. Then there is a homomorphic image C of B over A which is a pure injective hull of A; C can be constructed by using Zorn's lemma to find a suitable congruence on B. In a paper [4] which greatly generalises this and related facts about pure injectives, Walter Taylor asks (Problem 1.5) whether one can find a “construction” of C which is more concrete than the one mentioned above; he asks also whether the points of C can be explicitly described. In this note I return the answer No.

Let T be a theory in a first-order language L. Let L have a predicate ν0 ≺ ν1 such that in every model of T, the interpretation of ≺ is a linear ordering with infinite field. The order-type of this ordering will be called the order-type of the model . Several recent theorems have the following form: if T has a model of order-type ξ then T has a model of order-type ζ (see [1]). We shall add one to the list. The new feature of our result is that the order-type ζ may be in a sense “opposite” to ξ. Silver's Theorem 2.24 of [3] is a corollary of Theorem 1 below. Theorem 1. Let κ be a strong limit number (i.e. μ < κ implies 2μ < κ). Suppose λ < κ, and suppose that for every cardinal μ < κ, T has a model with where the order-type of contains no descending well-ordered sequences of length λ. Then for every cardinal μ ≥ the cardinality ∣L∣ of the language L, T has models and such that (a) the field of is the union of ≤ ∣L∣ well-ordered (inversely well-ordered) parts; (b) . The proof is by Ehrenfeucht-Mostowski models; we presuppose [2].