How Far Does Los's Theorem Extend To Kripke-Joyal Semantics? Sufficient Conditions, Counterexamples, and a Conjecture

Abstract

Los's theorem, also known as the fundamental result of ultraproducts, states that the ultraproduct over a family of structures for the same language satisfies a first-order formula if and only if the set of indices for which the structures satisfy the formula belongs to the underlying ultrafilter. The associated notion of satisfaction is the Tarskian one via the elements of the set-theoretic structure that allow interpreting the formula. In the context of topoi, Kripke--Joyal semantics extends Tarski's notion to categorical logic. In this article, we investigate Los's theorem for first-order structures on locally presentable topoi with Kripke--Joyal semantics. More precisely, we identify a set of structural properties on the ambient topos (two-valuedness and projectivity of the terminal object) used to derive a categorical analog of Los's theorem. As an application, we derive compactness results for several fragments of first-order logic. We also show via explicit counterexamples that our structural assumptions are only sufficient. The counterexamples suggest an external approach and we conjecture that Los's property for full first-order logic is equivalent to the existence of a conservative family of logical points compatible with the ultraproduct construction.