Strong tree properties, Kurepa trees, and guessing models

We investigate the generalized tree properties and guessing model properties introduced by Weiß and Viale, as well as natural weakenings thereof, studying the relationships among these properties and between these properties and other prominent combinatorial principles. We introduce a weakening of Viale and Weiß’s Guessing Model Property, which we call the Almost Guessing Property, and prove that it provides an alternate formulation of the slender tree property in the same way that the Guessing Model Property provides and alternate formulation of the ineffable slender tree property. We show that instances of the Almost Guessing Property have sufficient strength to imply, for example, failures of square or the nonexistence of weak Kurepa trees. We show that these instances of the Almost Guessing Property hold in the Mitchell model starting from a strongly compact cardinal and prove a number of other consistency results showing that certain implications between the principles under consideration are in general not reversible. In the process, we provide a new answer to a question of Viale by constructing a model in which, for all regular \(\theta \ge \omega _2\), there are stationarily many \(\omega _2\)-guessing models \(M \in {\mathscr {P}}_{\omega _2} H(\theta )\) that are not \(\omega _1\)-guessing models.