scholarly journals THE STRENGTH OF ABSTRACTION WITH PREDICATIVE COMPREHENSION

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN WALSH

AbstractFrege’s theorem says that second-order Peano arithmetic is interpretable in Hume’s Principle and full impredicative comprehension. Hume’s Principle is one example of anabstraction principle, while another paradigmatic example is Basic Law V from Frege’sGrundgesetze. In this paper we study the strength of abstraction principles in the presence of predicative restrictions on the comprehension schema, and in particular we study a predicative Fregean theory which contains all the abstraction principles whose underlying equivalence relations can be proven to be equivalence relations in a weak background second-order logic. We show that this predicative Fregean theory interprets second-order Peano arithmetic (cf. Theorem 3.2).

Author(s):  
Bob Hale ◽  
Crispin Wright

This article focuses on issues which neo-Fregeanism must address, even if the scope of its leading claims is restricted to elementary arithmetic. Many of these concern the capacity of abstraction principles—centrally, but not only, Hume's Principle itself—to discharge the implicitly definitional role in which the neo-Fregean casts them, and thereby to subserve a satisfactory apriorist epistemology for (at least part of) mathematics. Others concern the other main assumption that undergirds the specifically logicist aspect of the neo-Fregean project (and equally, of course, Frege's original project): that the logic to which abstraction principles are to be adjoined may legitimately be taken to include higher-order—at the very least, second-order—logic without compromise of the epistemological purposes of the project.


2004 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Øystein Linnebo

AbstractFrege Arithmetic (FA) is the second-order theory whose sole non-logical axiom is Hume's Principle, which says that the number of Fs is identical to the number of Gs if and only if the Fs and the Gs can be one-to-one correlated. According to Frege's Theorem, FA and some natural definitions imply all of second-order Peano Arithmetic. This paper distinguishes two dimensions of impredicativity involved in FA—one having to do with Hume's Principle, the other, with the underlying second-order logic—and investigates how much of Frege's Theorem goes through in various partially predicative fragments of FA. Theorem 1 shows that almost everything goes through, the most important exception being the axiom that every natural number has a successor. Theorem 2 shows that the Successor Axiom cannot be proved in the theories that are predicative in either dimension.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-91
Author(s):  
GRAHAM LEACH-KROUSE

AbstractIt’s well known that it’s possible to extract, from Frege’s Grudgesetze, an interpretation of second-order Peano Arithmetic in the theory $H{P^2}$, whose sole axiom is Hume’s principle. What’s less well known is that, in Die Grundlagen Der Arithmetic §82–83 Boolos (2011), George Boolos provided a converse interpretation of $H{P^2}$ in $P{A^2}$. Boolos’ interpretation can be used to show that the Frege’s construction allows for any model of $P{A^2}$ to be recovered from some model of $H{P^2}$. So the space of possible arithmetical universes is precisely characterized by Hume’s principle.In this paper, I show that a large class of second-order theories admit characterization by an abstraction principle in this sense. The proof makes use of structural abstraction principles, a class of abstraction principles of considerable intrinsic interest, and categories of interpretations in the sense of Visser (2003).


2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 229-246
Author(s):  
Georgi Georgiev ◽  
Tinko Tinchev

1993 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 579-601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard G. Heck

AbstractFrege's development of the theory of arithmetic in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik has long been ignored, since the formal theory of the Grundgesetze is inconsistent. His derivations of the axioms of arithmetic from what is known as Hume's Principle do not, however, depend upon that axiom of the system—Axiom V—which is responsible for the inconsistency. On the contrary, Frege's proofs constitute a derivation of axioms for arithmetic from Hume's Principle, in (axiomatic) second-order logic. Moreover, though Frege does prove each of the now standard Dedekind-Peano axioms, his proofs are devoted primarily to the derivation of his own axioms for arithmetic, which are somewhat different (though of course equivalent). These axioms, which may be yet more intuitive than the Dedekind-Peano axioms, may be taken to be “The Basic Laws of Cardinal Number”, as Frege understood them.Though the axioms of arithmetic have been known to be derivable from Hume's Principle for about ten years now, it has not been widely recognized that Frege himself showed them so to be; nor has it been known that Frege made use of any axiomatization for arithmetic whatsoever. Grundgesetze is thus a work of much greater significance than has often been thought. First, Frege's use of the inconsistent Axiom V may invalidate certain of his claims regarding the philosophical significance of his work (viz., the establish may invalidate certain of his claims regarding the philosophical significance of his work (viz., the establishment of Logicism), but it should not be allowed to obscure his mathematical accomplishments and his contribution to our understanding of arithmetic. Second, Frege's knowledge that arithmetic is derivable from Hume's Principle raises important sorts of questions about his philosophy of arithmetic. For example, “Why did Frege not simply abandon Axiom V and take Hume's Principle as an axiom?”


Author(s):  
Ian Rumfitt

This chapter considers what form a neo-Fregean account of ordinal numbers might take. It begins by discussing how the natural abstraction principle for ordinals yields a contradiction (the Burali-Forti Paradox) when combined with impredicative second-order logic. It continues by arguing that the fault lies in the use of impredicative logic rather than in the abstraction principle per se. As the focus is on a form of predicative logic which reflects a philosophical diagnosis of the source of the paradox, the chapter considers how far Hale and Wright’s neo-logicist programme in cardinal arithmetic can be carried out in that logic.


Author(s):  
Jim Edwards

According to Crispin Wright’s neo-logicist reconstruction of Frege’s philosophy of arithmetic, the truths of arithmetic are logical consequences, in the semantic sense, of second-order logic, augmented with an analytic axiom (Hume’s Principle). Neo-logicism thus views arithmetic truths as analytic, being the logical consequences of an analytic axiom. This chapter argues that the semantic relation of second-order logical consequence that is most naturally suited to the practice of arithmetic is proof-theoretically complete, and that given this, Gödel’s incompleteness result shows that there are arithmetical truths which are not derivable in Wright’s proof theory augmented by Hume’s Principle. The chapter thus challenges Wright’s programme of neo-Fregean logicism.


Author(s):  
Tim Button ◽  
Sean Walsh

In this chapter, the focus shifts from numbers to sets. Again, no first-order set theory can hope to get anywhere near categoricity, but Zermelo famously proved the quasi-categoricity of second-order set theory. As in the previous chapter, we must ask who is entitled to invoke full second-order logic. That question is as subtle as before, and raises the same problem for moderate modelists. However, the quasi-categorical nature of Zermelo's Theorem gives rise to some specific questions concerning the aims of axiomatic set theories. Given the status of Zermelo's Theorem in the philosophy of set theory, we include a stand-alone proof of this theorem. We also prove a similar quasi-categoricity for Scott-Potter set theory, a theory which axiomatises the idea of an arbitrary stage of the iterative hierarchy.


1984 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-428
Author(s):  
Wiktor Dańko

In this paper we propose to transform the Algorithmic Theory of Stacks (cf. Salwicki [30]) into a logic for expressing and proving properties of programs with stacks. We compare this logic to the Weak Second Order Logic (cf. [11, 15]) and prove theorems concerning axiomatizability without quantifiers (an analogon of Łoś-Tarski theorem) and χ 0 - categoricity (an analogon of Ryll-Nardzewski’s theorem).


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