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A set of sentences is called a theory; thus, individual sentences may be called theorems. To properly evaluate the truth (or falsehood) of a sentence, one must make reference to an interpretation of the theory. For first-order theories, interpretations are commonly called structures. Given a structure or interpretation, a sentence will have a ...
This is the most widespread approach, and is based on the idea that the meaning of the various parts of the propositions are given by the possible ways we can give a recursively specified group of interpretation functions from them to some predefined mathematical domains: an interpretation of first-order predicate logic is given by a mapping ...
First-order logic uses quantified variables over non-logical objects, and allows the use of sentences that contain variables. Rather than propositions such as "all men are mortal", in first-order logic one can have expressions in the form "for all x , if x is a man, then x is mortal"; where "for all x" is a quantifier, x is a variable, and "...
The corresponding first-order theory is the set of sentences that are actually true of the real numbers. There are several different such theories, with different expressive power, depending on the primitive operations that are allowed to be used in the expression.
In the case of model theory these axioms have the form of first-order sentences. The formalism of universal algebra is much more restrictive; essentially it only allows first-order sentences that have the form of universally quantified equations between terms, e.g. x y (x + y = y + x). One consequence is that the choice of a signature is more ...
The theory of infinite divisible torsion-free abelian groups is complete, as is the theory of infinite abelian groups of exponent p (for p prime). The theory of finite groups is the set of first-order statements in the language of groups that are true in all finite groups (there are plenty of infinite models of this theory). It is not ...
With the advent of algebraic logic, it became apparent that classical propositional calculus admits other semantics.In Boolean-valued semantics (for classical propositional logic), the truth values are the elements of an arbitrary Boolean algebra; "true" corresponds to the maximal element of the algebra, and "false" corresponds to the minimal element.
That is, for every sentence, the theory contains the sentence or its negation but not both (that is, either or ). Recursively axiomatizable first-order theories that are consistent and rich enough to allow general mathematical reasoning to be formulated cannot be complete, as demonstrated by Gödel's first incompleteness theorem .