A complete, decidable theory with two decidable models

Abstract

A well-known result of Vaught's is that no complete theory has exactly two nonisomorphic countable models. The main result of this paper is that there is a complete decidable theory with exactly two nonisomorphic decidable models.A model is decidable if it has a decidable satisfaction predicate. To be more precise, let T be a decidable theory, let {θn∣n < ω} be an effective enumeration of all formulas in L(T), and let be a countable model of T. For any indexing E = {ai∣ i < ω} of ∣∣, and any formula ϕ ∈ L(T), let ‘ϕE’ denote the result of substituting ‘ai’ for every free occurrence of ‘xi’ in ϕ, i < ω. Then is decidable just in case, for some indexing E of ∣∣, {n ∣ ⊨ θnE} is a recursive set of integers. It is easy to show that the decidability of a model does not depend on the choice of the effective enumeration of the formulas in L(T); we omit details. By a simple ‘effectivization’ of Henkin's proof of the completeness theorem (see Chang [1]) we haveFact 1. Every decidable consistent theory has a decidable model.Assume next that T is a complete decidable theory and {θn ∣ n < ω} is an effective enumeration of all formulas of L(T).