Infinitary logic

An infinitary logic is a logic that allows infinitely long statements and/or infinitely long proofs. Some infinitary logics may have different properties from those of standard first-order logic. In particular, infinitary logics may fail to be compact or complete. Notions of compactness and completeness that are equivalent in finitary logic sometimes are not so in infinitary logics. Therefore for infinitary logics, notions of strong compactness and strong completeness are defined. This article addresses Hilbert-type infinitary logics, as these have been extensively studied and constitute the most straightforward extensions of finitary logic. These are not, however, the only infinitary logics that have been formulated or studied.

Considering whether a certain infinitary logic named Ω-logic is complete promises to throw light on the continuum hypothesis.

As a language with infinitely long formulae is being presented, it is not possible to write such formulae down explicitly. To get around this problem a number of notational conveniences, which, strictly speaking, are not part of the formal language, are used. ${\displaystyle \cdots }$ is used to point out an expression that is infinitely long. Where it is unclear, the length of the sequence is noted afterwards. Where this notation becomes ambiguous or confusing, suffixes such as ${\displaystyle \lor _{\gamma <\delta }{A_{\gamma }}}$ are used to indicate an infinite disjunction over a set of formulae of cardinality ${\displaystyle \delta }$. The same notation may be applied to quantifiers for example ${\displaystyle \forall _{\gamma <\delta }{V_{\gamma }:}}$. This is meant to represent an infinite sequence of quantifiers for each ${\displaystyle V_{\gamma }}$ where ${\displaystyle \gamma <\delta }$.

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