A note on assumptions about Skolem functions

Skolemization is not an equivalence preserving transformation. For the purposes of refutational theorem proving it is sufficient that skolemization preserves satisfiability and unsatisfiability. Therefore there is sometimes some freedom in interpreting Skolem functions in a particular way. We show that in certain cases it is possible to exploit this freedom for simplifying formulae considerably. Examples for cases where this occurs systematically are the relational translation from modal logics to predicate logic and the relativization of first-order logics with sorts.