Quine’s Fluted Fragment is Non-elementary

We study the fluted fragment, a decidable fragment of first-order logic with an unbounded number of variables, originally identified by W.V. Quine. We show that the satisfiability problem for this fragment has non-elementary complexity, thus refuting an earlier published claim by W.C. Purdy that it is in NExpTime. More precisely, we consider, for all m greater than 1, the intersection
of the fluted fragment and the m-variable fragment of first-order logic. We show that this subfragment forces (m/2)-tuply exponentially large models, and that its satisfiability problem is (m/2)-NExpTime-hard. We round off by using a corrected version of Purdy’s construction to show that the m-variable fluted fragment has the m-tuply exponential model property, and that its satisfiability problem is in m-NExpTime.