On the Expressive Power of Inquisitive Team Logic and Inquisitive First-Order Logic

Inquisitive team logic is a variant of inquisitive logic interpreted in team semantics, which has been argued to provide a natural setting for the regimentation of dependence claims.With respect to sentences, this logic is known to be expressively equivalent with first-order logic.In this article we show that, on the contrary, the expressive power of open formulas in this logic properly exceeds that of first-order logic.On the way to this result, we show that if inquisitive team logic is extended with the range-generating universal quantifier adopted in dependence logic, the resulting logic can express finiteness; as a consequence, this logic is not compact and has non-arithmetic complexity.We further extend our results to standard inquisitive first-order logic, showing that some sentences of this logic express non first-order properties of models, thus settling an open problem posed in [5].

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Publication Details

Journal
Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science
Published
2026-06-28
DOI
https://doi.org/10.4204/eptcs.447.31
Primary Topic
Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

On the Expressive Power of Inquisitive Team Logic and Inquisitive First-Order Logic

Juha Kontinen, Ivano Ciardelli
Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science
Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge
article

On the Expressive Power of Inquisitive Team Logic and Inquisitive First-Order Logic

Juha Kontinen, Ivano Ciardelli
article en

Abstract

Inquisitive team logic is a variant of inquisitive logic interpreted in team semantics, which has been argued to provide a natural setting for the regimentation of dependence claims.With respect to sentences, this logic is known to be expressively equivalent with first-order logic.In this article we show that, on the contrary, the expressive power of open formulas in this logic properly exceeds that of first-order logic.On the way to this result, we show that if inquisitive team logic is extended with the range-generating universal quantifier adopted in dependence logic, the resulting logic can express finiteness; as a consequence, this logic is not compact and has non-arithmetic complexity.We further extend our results to standard inquisitive first-order logic, showing that some sentences of this logic express non first-order properties of models, thus settling an open problem posed in [5].

Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer ScienceVol. 447
University of Helsinki (FI), University of Padua (IT)
HORIZON EUROPE Framework Programme
Peace, Justice and strong institutions
Openalex Percentile: Top 6%
Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge
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