Jump to content

Robinson's joint consistency theorem

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Tillmo (talk | contribs) at 07:54, 14 August 2007 (typo). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Robinson's Joint Consistency theorem is an important theorem of mathematical logic. It is related to Craig interpolation and Beth definability.

The classical formulation of Robinson's Joint Consistency theorem is as follows:

Let and be first-order theories. If and are consistent and the intersection is complete (in the common language of and ), then the union is consistent. Note that a theory is complete if it decides every formula, i.e. either and .

Since the completeness assumption is quite hard to fulfill, there is a variant of th theorem:

Let and be first-order theories. If and are consistent and if there is no formula in the common language of and such that and , then the union is consistent.