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In the study of databases and maps between databases, certain formulas in first-order logic are particularly important. They’re called GLAV constraints, and they’re of the form
where are lists of variables and , are atomic predicates.
This reminds me a bit of coherent logic or geometric logic, but it’s not. What kind of logic uses only GLAV constraints as formulas?
That just looks like a sentential form of something you could just as easily express as a sequent between predicates , and so it looks like something accommodated by coherent/geometric logic or even something weaker. Am I missing something?
Can we view the expression on the right as an instance of a co-end?
Keith: yes. A predicate can be viewed as a -enriched profunctor where is the type of the variable , and is the type of . In usual logic and are interpreted as sets and is the same as . There is always a trivial or tautological profunctor which is in usual logic is denoted “true”. Then the -enriched profunctor composite is given by .
I really need to study more (co)end calculus.
Whoops - I’d forgotten that sequents implicitly give you universal quantifiers. So the logic of GLAV constraints is weaker than coherent logic. Does it fit in regular logic? The nLab article on regular logic is a bit reticent about what counts as a legitimate sequent in that form of logic.
It’s usually easier (for me, anyway) to focus on semantics, i.e., what this would mean in regular categories. So we have some subobject and a subobject , and represents the image of the projection , and so an axiom of type is interpreted by a condition on subobjects. (I’m assuming that a GLAV theory is given by axioms of the type you specified.)
So yes, regular categories/logic at least have enough in them to express such sequents. But, there are some restrictions on the strength of the logic with which you reason with them (i.e., not enough rules of deduction in regular logic to do some things). I’m afraid that our articles on “internal logics” are a little skimpy on the rules of deduction allowed in each case, but again it’s probably easier just to consider in each case the semantics. For example, in regular logic, we shouldn’t expect to be able to prove that and are equivalent for formulas of the same type, since subobject lattices in regular categories typically aren’t distributive (this is false for example in abelian groups). But we should expect to be able to prove (even if we don’t exactly know the rules of deduction!) that is equivalent to , because pulling back along preserves images in a regular category.
in regular logic you can’t even write down : the connective doesn’t exist. Semantically, subobject posets in a regular category don’t even necessarily have joins.
But beyond that, there’s no restriction on the inference rules of regular logic — they’re just all the rules of ordinary intuitionistic natural deduction or sequent calculus except the ones involving connectives like that don’t exist in regular logic.
Oops! Yes, you’re right.
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