We prove that a countable complete theory whose prime model has an infinite definable subset, all of whose elements are named, has at least four countable models up to isomorphism. The motivation for this is the conjecture that a countable theory with a minimal model has infinitely many countable models. In this connection we first prove that a minimal prime model A has an expansion by a finite number of constants A′ such that the set of algebraic elements of A′ contains an infinite definable subset.

We note that our main conjecture strengthens the Baldwin–Lachlan theorem. We also note that due to Vaught's result that a countable theory cannot have exactly two countable models, the weakest possible nontrivial result for a non-ℵ0-categorical theory is that it has at least four countable models.

§1. Notation and preliminaries. Our notation follows Chang and Keisler [1], except that we denote models by A, B, etc. We use the same symbol to refer to the universe of a model. Models we refer to are always in a countable language. For T a countable complete theory we let n(T) be the number of countable models of T up to isomorphism. ∃n means ‘there are exactly n’.