Some properties of the syntactic p-recursion categories generated by consistent, recursively enumerable extensions of Peano arithmetic.

Abstract

The dominical categories were introduced by Di Paola and Heller, as a first step toward a category-theoretic treatment of the generalized first Godel incompleteness theorem [1]. In his Ph.D. dissertation [7], Rosolini subsequently defined the closely related p-categories, which should prove pertinent to category-theoretic representations of incompleteness for intuitionistic systems. The precise relationship between these two concepts is as follows: every dominical category is a pointed p-category, but there are p-categories, indeed pointed p-isotypes (all pairs of objects being isomorphic) with a Turing morphism that are not dominical. The first of these assertions is an easy consequence of the fact that in a dominical category C by definition the near product functor when restricted to the subcategory Ct, of total morphisms of C (as “total” is defined in [1]) constitutes a bona fide product such that the derived associativity and commutativity isomorphisms are natural on C × C × C and C × C, respectively, as noted in [7]. As to the second, p-recursion categories (that is, pointed p-isotypes having a Turing morphism) that are not dominical were defined and studied by Montagna in [6], the syntactic p-categories ST and S′T associated with consistent, recursively enumerable extensions of Peano arithmetic, PA. These merit detailed investigation on several counts.