On Scott and Karp trees of uncountable models

Abstract

AbstractLet and be two countable relational models of the same first order language. If the models are nonisomorphic, there is a unique countable ordinal α with the property thati.e. and are L∞ω-equivalent up to quantifier-rank α but not up to α + 1. In this paper we consider models and of cardinality ω1 and construct trees which have a similar relation to and as a above. For this purpose we introduce a new ordering T ≪ T′ of trees, which may have some independent interest of its own. It turns out that the above ordinal α has two qualities which coincide in countable models but will differ in uncountable models. Respectively, two kinds of trees emerge from α. We call them Scott trees and Karp trees, respectively. The definition and existence of these trees is based on an examination of the Ehrenfeucht game of length ω1 between and . We construct two models of power ω1 with mutually noncomparable Scott trees.