Infinitary Extensions
Recall the definition of sup and inf from the section above on the underlying partial order of a Boolean algebra. A complete Boolean algebra is one every subset of which has both a sup and an inf, even the infinite subsets. Gaifman and Hales independently showed that infinite free complete Boolean algebras do not exist. This suggests that a logic with set-sized-infinitary operations may have class-many terms—just as a logic with finitary operations may have infinitely many terms.
There is however another approach to introducing infinitary Boolean operations: simply drop "finitary" from the definition of Boolean algebra. A model of the equational theory of the algebra of all operations on {0,1} of arity up to the cardinality of the model is called a complete atomic Boolean algebra, or CABA. (In place of this awkward restriction on arity we could allow any arity, leading to a different awkwardness, that the signature would then be larger than any set, that is, a proper class. One benefit of the latter approach is that it simplifies the definition of homomorphism between CABAs of different cardinality.) Such an algebra can be defined equivalently as a complete Boolean algebra that is atomic, meaning that every element is a sup of some set of atoms. Free CABAs exist for all cardinalities of a set V of generators, namely the power set algebra 22V, this being the obvious generalization of the finite free Boolean algebras. This neatly rescues infinitary Boolean logic from the fate the Gaifman–Hales result seemed to consign it to.
The nonexistence of free complete Boolean algebras can be traced to failure to extend the equations of Boolean logic suitably to all laws that should hold for infinitary conjunction and disjunction, in particular the neglect of distributivity in the definition of complete Boolean algebra. A complete Boolean algebra is called completely distributive when arbitrary conjunctions distribute over arbitrary disjunctions and vice versa. A Boolean algebra is a CABA if and only if it is complete and completely distributive, giving a third definition of CABA. A fourth definition is as any Boolean algebra isomorphic to a power set algebra.
A complete homomorphism is one that preserves all sups that exist, not just the finite sups, and likewise for infs. The category CABA of all CABAs and their complete homomorphisms is dual to the category of sets and their functions, meaning that it is equivalent to the opposite of that category (the category resulting from reversing all morphisms). Things are not so simple for the category Bool of Boolean algebras and their homomorphisms, which Marshall Stone showed in effect (though he lacked both the language and the conceptual framework to make the duality explicit) to be dual to the category of totally disconnected compact Hausdorff spaces, subsequently called Stone spaces.
Another infinitary class intermediate between Boolean algebras and complete Boolean algebras is the notion of a sigma-algebra. This is defined analogously to complete Boolean algebras, but with sups and infs limited to countable arity. That is, a sigma-algebra is a Boolean algebra with all countable sups and infs. Because the sups and infs are of bounded cardinality, unlike the situation with complete Boolean algebras, the Gaifman-Hales result does not apply and free sigma-algebras do exist. Unlike the situation with CABAs however, the free countably generated sigma algebra is not a power set algebra.
Read more about this topic: Boolean Algebras Canonically Defined
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