On direct products of theories

Abstract

This paper deals with the notion of direct product in the theory of decision problems.Elementary mathematical theories are always concerned with certain functions defined in a set I (called the universe of discourse of the theory) and certain relations with the common domain I. The notions of functions and relations are known to be reducible to each other. To avoid duplication of definitions and proofs we shall eliminate the former notion in favor of the latter and consider only theories in which all the primitive terms are of the type of relations (with an arbitrary number of arguments).It is easy to define for relations the notion of a direct product in the way which is usual in abstract algebra. We are led to this definition in a very natural way when we reflect that relations are but a particular case of functions, and the direct product of an arbitrary number of functions is defined in algebra.A relation which is representable as a product of an arbitrary number of pairwise identical relations is called the power-relation, and the relations which occur as factors are called the base-relations.The content of the present paper can now be characterized more precisely as follows.We shall discuss a theory of which the primitive notions are representable as powers of certain base-relations, and shall try to reduce all the problems concerning this theory (in particular the decision problem) to problems concerning the theory of the base-relations. It will be seen that this reduction is in fact possible, and that several particular cases of the decision problem, the solutions of which are known from the literature, can be included in the general scheme established in the present paper.