The syntax and semantics of entailment in duality theory

Abstract

AbstractBoth syntactic and semantic solutions are given for the entailment problem of duality theory. The test algebra theorem provides both a syntactic solution to the entailment problem in terms of primitive positive formula and a new derivation of the corresponding result in clone theory, viz. the syntactic description of Inv(Pol(R)) for a given set R of unitary relations on a finite set. The semantic solution to the entailment problem follows from the syntactic one, or can be given in the form of an algorithm. It shows, in the special case of a purely relational type, that duality-theoretic entailment is describable in terms of five constructs, namely trivial relations, intersection, repetition removal, product, and retractive projection. All except the last are concrete, in the sense that they are described by a quantifier-free formula. It is proved that if the finite algebra M generates a congruence-distributive variety and all subalgebras of M are subdirectly irreducible, then concrete constructs suffice to describe entailment. The concept of entailment appropriate to strong dualities is also introduced, and described in terms of coordinate projections, restriction of domains, and composition of partial functions.