Let P be a poset and let us say that a subset A of P is a down-set if: $x \in A, y < x \implies y \in A.$
A directed set is a poset P such that for every two elements, $a,b \in P$ we can find $c \in P$ such that $c \geq a $ and $c \geq b$. Now, I am trying to prove the following statement:
A poset P is directed if and only if for every finite down-set D we can find a $c \in P$ such that $c \geq d, \forall d \in D$.
One direction is very easy, namely, to show that if a poset is directed, we can find such an upper bound for every finite down-set. The other direction seems a bit more tricky, but I suspect there's something obvious I am missing here. How could I show the other implication?
Is the statement really true? What about say $\mathbb{Z} \amalg \mathbb{Z}$, with the usual order on each factor? Are there any non-empty finite down-sets here? For what I can see, $\mathbb{Z} \amalg \mathbb{Z}$ is not directed, yet if there are no other finite down-sets than the empty set, then it satisfies the statement above.