Interpretation (logic)

An interpretation is an assignment of meaning to the symbols of a formal language. Many formal languages used in mathematics, logic, and theoretical computer science are defined in solely syntactic terms, and as such do not have any meaning until they are given some interpretation. The general study of interpretations of formal languages is called formal semantics.A formal language consists of a possibly infinite set of sentences (variously called words or formulas) built from a fixed set of letters or symbols. The inventory from which these letters are taken is called the alphabet over which the language is defined. To distinguish the strings of symbols that are in a formal language from arbitrary strings of symbols, the former are sometimes called well-formed formulæ (wff). The essential feature of a formal language is that its syntax can be defined without reference to interpretation. For example, we can determine that (P or Q) is a well-formed formula even without knowing whether it is true or false.Many of the commonly studied interpretations associate each sentence in a formal language with a single truth value, either True or False. These interpretations are called truth functional; they include the usual interpretations of propositional and first-order logic. The sentences that are made true by a particular assignment are said to be satisfied by that assignment.An interpretation of a theory is the relationship between a theory and some subject matter when there is a many-to-one correspondence between certain elementary statements of the theory, and certain statements related to the subject matter. If every elementary statement in the theory has a correspondent it is called a full interpretation, otherwise it is called a partial interpretation.The formal language for propositional logic consists of formulas built up from propositional symbols (also called sentential symbols, sentential variables, and propositional variables) and logical connectives. The only non-logical symbols in a formal language for propositional logic are the propositional symbols, which are often denoted by capital letters. To make the formal language precise, a specific set of propositional symbols must be fixed.Unlike propositional logic, where every language is the same apart from a choice of a different set of propositional variables, there are many different first-order languages. Each first-order language is defined by a signature. The signature consists of a set of non-logical symbols and an identification of each of these symbols as a constant symbol, a function symbol, or a predicate symbol. In the case of function and predicate symbols, a natural number arity is also assigned. The alphabet for the formal language consists of logical constants, the equality relation symbol =, all the symbols from the signature, and an additional infinite set of symbols known as variables.A formal language for higher-order predicate logic looks much the same as a formal language for first-order logic. The difference is that there are now many different types of variables. Some variables correspond to elements of the domain, as in first-order logic. Other variables correspond to objects of higher type: subsets of the domain, functions from the domain, functions that take a subset of the domain and return a function from the domain to subsets of the domain, etc. All of these types of variables can be quantified.The interpretations of propositional logic and predicate logic described above are not the only possible interpretations. In particular, there are other types of interpretations that are used in the study of non-classical logic (such as intuitionistic logic), and in the study of modal logic.Many formal languages are associated with a particular interpretation that is used to motivate them. For example, the first-order signature for set theory includes only one binary relation, ∈, which is intended to represent set membership, and the domain of discourse in a first-order theory of the natural numbers is intended to be the set of natural numbers.There are other uses of the term 'interpretation' that are commonly used, which do not refer to the assignment of meanings to formal languages.