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Concept
Decidability (logic)
Summary
In logic, a true/false decision problem is decidable if there exists an effective method for deriving the correct answer. Zeroth-order logic (propositional logic) is decidable, whereas first-order and higher-order logic are not. Logical systems are decidable if membership in their set of logically valid formulas (or theorems) can be effectively determined. A theory (set of sentences closed under logical consequence) in a fixed logical system is decidable if there is an effective method for determining whether arbitrary formulas are included in the theory. Many important problems are undecidable, that is, it has been proven that no effective method for determining membership (returning a correct answer after finite, though possibly very long, time in all cases) can exist for them.
Each logical system comes with both a syntactic component, which among other things determines the notion of provability, and a semantic component, which determines the notion of logical validity. The logically valid formulas of a system are sometimes called the theorems of the system, especially in the context of first-order logic where Gödel's completeness theorem establishes the equivalence of semantic and syntactic consequence. In other settings, such as linear logic, the syntactic consequence (provability) relation may be used to define the theorems of a system.
A logical system is decidable if there is an effective method for determining whether arbitrary formulas are theorems of the logical system. For example, propositional logic is decidable, because the truth-table method can be used to determine whether an arbitrary propositional formula is logically valid.
First-order logic is not decidable in general; in particular, the set of logical validities in any signature that includes equality and at least one other predicate with two or more arguments is not decidable. Logical systems extending first-order logic, such as second-order logic and type theory, are also undecidable.
The validities of monadic predicate calculus with identity are decidable, however.
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