Pairs without infimum in the recursively enumerable weak truth table degrees

Abstract

wtt-reducibility has become of some importance in the last years through the works of Ladner and Sasso [1975], Stob [1983] and Ambos-Spies [1984]. It differs from Turing reducibility by a recursive bound on the use of the reduction. This makes some proofs easier in the wtt degrees than in the Turing degrees. Certain proofs carry over directly from the Turing to the wtt degrees, especially those based on permitting. But the converse is also possible. There are some r.e. Turing degrees which consist of a single r.e. wtt degree (the so-called contiguous degrees; see Ladner and Sasso [1975]). Thus it suffices to prove a result about contiguous wtt degrees using an easier construction, and it carries over to the corresponding Turing degrees.In this work we prove some results on pairs of r.e. wtt degrees which have no infimum. The existence of such a pair has been shown by Ladner and Sasso. Here we use a different technique of Jockusch [1981] to prove this result (Theorem 1) together with some stronger ones. We show that a pair without infimum exists above a given incomplete wtt degree (Theorem 5) and below any promptly simple wtt degree (Theorem 12). In Theorem 17 we prove, however, that there are r.e. wtt degrees such that any pair below them has an infimum. This shows that certain initial segments of the wtt degrees are lattices. Thus there is a structural difference between the wtt and Turing degrees where the pairs without infimum are dense (Ambos-Spies [1984]).