An α-finite injury method of the unbounded type

Abstract

Let α be an admissible ordinal. In this paper we study the structure of the upper semilattice of α-recursively enumerable degrees. Various results about the structure which are of fundamental importance had been obtained during the past two years (Sacks-Simpson [7], Lerman [4], Shore [9]). In particular, the method of finite priority argument of Friedberg and Muchnik was successfully generalized in [7] to an α-finite priority argument to give a solution of Post's problem for all admissible ordinals. We refer the reader to [7] for background material, and we also follow closely the notations used there.Whereas [7] and [4] study priority arguments in which the number of injuries inflicted on a proper initial segment of requirements can be effectively bounded (Lemma 2.3 of [7]), we tackle here priority arguments in which no such bounds exist. To this end, we focus our attention on the fine structure of Lα, much in the fashion of Jensen [2], and show that we can still use a priority argument on an indexing set of requirements just short enough to give us the necessary bounds we seek.