Adjective
Of a subset of a partially ordered set; containing elements at least as late as any given element of the set, relative to the given partial order.
Usage- not-comparable
- Related words
- Examples
-
The Archimedean property of real numbers means that the natural numbers form a cofinal subset of ℝ.
More examples (2)
In order to apply this result to Quine’s project of radical translation, we take X to be the set of all Native observation sentences and construe an observational sub-language that contains only observation sentences and all their syntactic parts such that X is cofinal in the set of expressions of the sub-language.
The dual notion of cofinality is coinitiality: a set S#92;subseteqP is called coinitial if for every p#92;inP there is q#92;inS such that q#92;lep. Equivalently, a coinitial set in P is a cofinal set in P#92;ast#58;#61;(P,#92;ge). […] Both cofinality and coinitiality need not be well-defined for an arbitrary partial order (e.g. if the partial order is only made of two incomparable elements).