Past exam of the logic and set theory course of the University of Oxford 2009 A 3 d ii Solution 2026-10-31
Neither constants alone nor functions alone gives the same uniform adequacy on all nonempty carriers. A one-element set has exactly one interpretation of each function symbol of any finite arity and of every constant symbol. In contrast it has two interpretations of a unary predicate: empty or full. Thus a fixed purely functional or constant-only language has only one structure on that singleton, and cannot encode both truth values of by a same-carrier truth-preserving translation with reconstruction. This is the singleton truth-preservation obstruction to expressive completeness, even when logical equality is available.
Constants alone also cannot represent general variable-dependent relations on larger infinite carriers: a fixed formula mentions only finitely many named elements, and its remaining equality tests do not encode an arbitrary binary relation. Functions offer more flexibility. On carriers with at least two elements, predicates can be encoded by characteristic functions taking two distinguished values, and constants can be represented by constant-valued unary functions if explicit constant symbols are forbidden. Such a construction can work after adding axioms for distinct truth markers, but those axioms exclude the singleton case. Enlarging the carrier or adding a Boolean sort is another possible encoding; it changes the same-carrier sense established in the preceding part and must not be silently identified with it.
Past exam of the logic and set theory course of the University of Oxford 2010 A 1 d ii Solution 2026-10-31
No. The full language can express , which is false in the singleton structure from part (i). Every formula of the reduced language is true in that structure under every assignment in a first-order structure. Therefore no formula of the reduced language can be logically equivalent to this negated equality.
This is a singleton truth-preservation obstruction to expressive completeness. Adding both quantifiers to logical implication does not repair the failure: on this particular nonempty singleton model, quantification cannot create a false formula from true atomic formulas.