Monotone recursive types and recursive data representations in Cedille

Guided by Tarksi’s fixpoint theorem in order theory, we show how to derive monotone recursive types with constant-time roll and unroll operations within Cedille, an impredicative, constructive, and logically consistent pure typed lambda calculus. This derivation takes place within the preorder on Cedille types induced by type inclusions, a notion which is expressible within the theory itself. As applications, we use monotone recursive types to generically derive two recursive representations of data in lambda calculus, the Parigot and Scott encoding. For both encodings, we prove induction and examine the computational and extensional properties of their destructor, iterator, and primitive recursor in Cedille. For our Scott encoding in particular, we translate into Cedille a construction due to Lepigre and Raffalli (2019) that equips Scott naturals with primitive recursion, then extend this construction to derive a generic induction principle. This allows us to give efficient and provably unique (up to function extensionality) solutions for the iteration and primitive recursion schemes for Scott-encoded data.

Finitism, imperative programs and primitive recursion

Following the Crisis of Foundations Hilbert proposed to consider a finitistic form of arithmetic as mathematics’ safe core. This approach to finitism has often admitted primitive recursive function definitions as obviously finitistic, but some have advocated the inclusion of additional variants of recurrence, while others argued that, to the contrary, primitive recursion exceeds finitism. In a landmark essay, William Tait contested the finitistic nature of these extensions, due to their impredicativity, and advocated identifying finitism with primitive recursive arithmetic, a stance often referred to as Tait’s Thesis. However, a problem with Tait’s argument is that the recurrence schema has itself impredicative and non-finitistic facets, starting with an explicit reference to the functions being defined, which are after all infinite objects. It is therefore desirable to buttress Tait’s Thesis on grounds that avoid altogether any trace of concrete infinities or impredicativity. We propose here to do just that, building on the generic framework of [ 13]. We provide further evidence for Tait’s Thesis by outlining a proof of a purely finitistic version of Parsons’ theorem, whose intuitive gist is that finitistic reasoning is equivalent to finitistic computing.

Boolean Role Inclusions in DL-Lite With and Without Time

Traditionally, description logic has focused on representing and reasoning about classes rather than relations (roles), which has been justified by the deterioration of the computational properties if expressive role inclusions are added. The situation is even worse in the temporalised setting, where monodicity is viewed as an almost necessary condition for decidability. We take a fresh look at the description logic DL-Lite with expressive role inclusions, both with and without a temporal dimension. While we confirm that full Boolean expressive power on roles leads to FO^2-like behaviour in the atemporal case and undecidability in the temporal case, we show that, rather surprisingly, the restriction to Krom and Horn role inclusions leads to much lower complexity in the atemporal case and to decidability (and ExpSpace-completeness) in the temporal case, even if one admits full Booleans on concepts. The latter result is one of very few instances breaking the monodicity barrier in temporal FO. This is also reflected on the data complexity level, where we obtain new rewritability results into FO with relational primitive recursion and FO with unary divisibility predicates.

Primitive recursion in the abstract

Recurrence can be used as a function definition schema for any nontrivial free algebra, yielding the same computational complexity in all cases. We show that primitive-recursive computing is in fact independent of free algebras altogether, and can be characterized by a generic programming principle, namely the control of iteration by the depletion of finite components of the underlying structure.

Data Complexity and Rewritability of Ontology-Mediated Queries in Metric Temporal Logic under the Event-Based Semantics

We investigate the data complexity of answering queries mediated by metric temporal logic ontologies under the event-based semantics assuming that data instances are finite timed words timestamped with binary fractions. We identify classes of ontology-mediated queries answering which can be done in AC0, NC1, L, NL, P, and coNP for data complexity, provide their rewritings to first-order logic and its extensions with primitive recursion, transitive closure or datalog, and establish lower complexity bounds.

A DIRECT PROOF OF SCHWICHTENBERG’S BAR RECURSION CLOSURE THEOREM

In [12], Schwichtenberg showed that the System T definable functionals are closed under a rule-like version Spector’s bar recursion of lowest type levels 0 and 1. More precisely, if the functional Y which controls the stopping condition of Spector’s bar recursor is T-definable, then the corresponding bar recursion of type levels 0 and 1 is already T-definable. Schwichtenberg’s original proof, however, relies on a detour through Tait’s infinitary terms and the correspondence between ordinal recursion for $\alpha < {\varepsilon _0}$ and primitive recursion over finite types. This detour makes it hard to calculate on given concrete system T input, what the corresponding system T output would look like. In this paper we present an alternative (more direct) proof based on an explicit construction which we prove correct via a suitably defined logical relation. We show through an example how this gives a straightforward mechanism for converting bar recursive definitions into T-definitions under the conditions of Schwichtenberg’s theorem. Finally, with the explicit construction we can also easily state a sharper result: if Y is in the fragment Ti then terms built from $BR^{\mathbb{N},\sigma } $ for this particular Y are definable in the fragment ${T_{i + {\rm{max}}\left\{ {1,{\rm{level}}\left( \sigma \right)} \right\} + 2}}$.