Level Compactness

Abstract

The concept of compactness is a necessary condition of any system that is going to call itself a finitary method of proof. However, it can also apply to predicates of sets of formulas in general and in that manner it can be used in relation to level functions, a flavor of measure functions. In what follows we will tie these concepts of measure and compactness together and expand some concepts which appear in d'Entremont's master's thesis, "Inference and Level." We will also provide some applications of the concept of level to the "preservationist" program of paraconsistent logic. We apply the finite level compactness theorem in this paper to get a Lindenbaum flavor extension lemma and a maximal "forcibility" theorem. Each of these is based on an abstract deductive system X which satisfies minimal conditions of inference and has generalizations of 'and' and 'not' as logical words.