An absoluteness principle for Borel sets

1998 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 663-693 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Hjorth

The purpose of these notes is to describe an absoluteness principle due to Jacques Stern and discuss some applications to the general study of Borel sets. This paper will not be engaged in independence results, but in proving outright theorems about the Borel hierarchy.Roughly speaking, Stern's absoluteness principle states that if a certain set can be introduced into the universe by forcing, then it can be introduced by some small forcing notion.The notation , and so on, will be defined in Section 1; this gives a notational system for describing the complexity of Borel sets beyond Fσ or Gδ. The “universe” refers to the totality of all sets. “Forcing” refers to Paul Cohen's technique for, in some sense, changing this totality by the introduction of new sets. Here “small” means relatively small cardinality.The size of this small forcing notion is roughly the ath iteration of the power set operation. Just to get an idea of what this theorem might be saying, we can argue that under certain conditions, if a closed set can be introduced by forcing, then it exists already. There are a number of other qualifications that need to be made to this rough description, and we will come to them later.Unlike, say, Shoenfield absoluteness, Stern's absoluteness can only be made understood in the terminology of forcing. Since forcing is typically associated with the pursuit of independence results, we could easily assume that Stern's work has little relevance in proving positive theorems about the Borel hierarchy.However, this would be untrue. Using abstract and indirect metamathematical arguments, and availing ourselves of Stern's absoluteness principle, we will prove a string of ZFC theorems for which no direct proof is known.

Author(s):  
Kyriakos Keremedis ◽  
Eleftherios Tachtsis ◽  
Eliza Wajch

AbstractIn the absence of the axiom of choice, the set-theoretic status of many natural statements about metrizable compact spaces is investigated. Some of the statements are provable in $$\mathbf {ZF}$$ ZF , some are shown to be independent of $$\mathbf {ZF}$$ ZF . For independence results, distinct models of $$\mathbf {ZF}$$ ZF and permutation models of $$\mathbf {ZFA}$$ ZFA with transfer theorems of Pincus are applied. New symmetric models of $$\mathbf {ZF}$$ ZF are constructed in each of which the power set of $$\mathbb {R}$$ R is well-orderable, the Continuum Hypothesis is satisfied but a denumerable family of non-empty finite sets can fail to have a choice function, and a compact metrizable space need not be embeddable into the Tychonoff cube $$[0, 1]^{\mathbb {R}}$$ [ 0 , 1 ] R .


2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLIFFORD J. CARRUBBA ◽  
MATTHEW GABEL ◽  
LACEY MURRAH ◽  
RYAN CLOUGH ◽  
ELIZABETH MONTGOMERY ◽  
...  

Scholars often use roll-call votes to study legislative behaviour. However, many legislatures only conclude a minority of decisions by roll call. Thus, if these votes are not a random sample of the universe of votes cast, scholars may be drawing misleading inferences. In fact, theories over why roll-call votes are requested would predict selection bias based on exactly the characteristics of legislative voting that scholars have most heavily studied. This article demonstrates the character and severity of this sampling problem empirically by examining European Parliament vote data for a whole year. Given that many legislatures decided only a fraction of their legislation by roll call, these findings have potentially important implications for the general study of legislative behaviour.


2003 ◽  
Vol 03 (01) ◽  
pp. 67-83
Author(s):  
HARVEY M. FRIEDMAN

We present some new set and class theoretic independence results from ZFC and NBGC that are particularly simple and close to the primitives of membership and equality (see Secs. 4 and 5). They are shown to be equivalent to familiar small large cardinal hypotheses. We modify these independendent statements in order to give an example of a sentence in set theory with 5 quantifiers which is independent of ZFC (see Sec. 6). It is known that all 3 quantifier sentences are decided in a weak fragment of ZF without power set (see [4]).


1994 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-472
Author(s):  
Garvin Melles

Mathematicians have one over on the physicists in that they already have a unified theory of mathematics, namely, set theory. Unfortunately, the plethora of independence results since the invention of forcing has taken away some of the luster of set theory in the eyes of many mathematicians. Will man's knowledge of mathematical truth be forever limited to those theorems derivable from the standard axioms of set theory, ZFC? This author does not think so, he feels that set theorists' intuition about the universe of sets is stronger than ZFC. Here in this paper, using part of this intuition, we introduce some axiom schemata which we feel are very natural candidates for being considered as part of the axioms of set theory. These schemata assert the existence of many generics over simple inner models. The main purpose of this article is to present arguments for why the assertion of the existence of such generics belongs to the axioms of set theory.Our central guiding principle in justifying the axioms is what Maddy called the rule of thumb maximize in her survey article on the axioms of set theory, [8] and [9]. More specifically, our intuition conforms with that expressed by Mathias in his article What is Maclane Missing? challenging Mac Lane's view of set theory.


1996 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1287-1304
Author(s):  
Abhijit Dasgupta

The study of infinitary Boolean operations was undertaken by the early researchers of descriptive set theory soon after Suslin's discovery of the important operation. The first attempt to lay down their theory in a systematic fashion was the work of Kantorovich and Livenson [5], where they call these the analytical operations. Earlier, Hausdorff had introduced the δs operations — essentially same as the monotoneω-ary Boolean operations, and Kolmogorov, independently of Hausdorff, had discovered the same objects, which were used in his study of the R operator.The ω-ary Boolean operations turned out to be closely related to most of the classical hierarchies over a fixed Polish space X, including, e. g., the Borel hierarchy (), the difference hierarchies of Hausdorff (Dη()), the C-hierarchy (Cξ) of Selivanovski, and the projective hierarchy (): for each of these hierarchies, every level can be expressed as the range of an ω-ary Boolean operation applied to all possible sequences of open subsets of X. In the terminology of Dougherty [3], every level is “open-ω-Boolean” (if and are collections of subsets of X and I is any set, is said to be -I-Boolean if there exists an I-ary Boolean operation Φ such that = Φ, i. e. is the range of Φ restricted to all possible I-sequences of sets from ). If in addition, the space X has a basis consisting of clopen sets, then the levels of the above hierarchies are also “clopen-ω-Boolean.”


1983 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-238
Author(s):  
T. E. Forster

The permutation method was first applied to NF by Scott; other workers have published results ([2], [3]; or see [4] for a survey). Some of the results proved here have a more metalogical character than most previously yielded by this method. Hinnion and Petry (unpublished, but see [4]) proved that the existence of objects x such that x = {y: x∈y} is consistent with NF. (The significance of this is that the operation that sends x to {y: x∈y} respects ∈ and is thus an embedding.) It is demonstrated below that the existence of such objects is independent of the axioms of NF.The existence of nontrivial automorphisms of the universe is not an interesting possibility in ZF, since it contradicts wellfoundedness. Similar auguments are not available in NF, however, and it is shown below that if NF + AC for pairs is consistent, then we can consistently add an axiom stating that there is a ∈-automorphism of the universe that is a set of the model. (In the proof given below, the automorphism is in fact of order 2, but natural enrichments of the construction enable one to find automorphisms of other orders with suitable versions of choice as additional hypotheses.)


1987 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 232-242
Author(s):  
Randall Dougherty

Kantorovich and Livenson [6] initiated the study of infinitary Boolean operations applied to the subsets of the Baire space and related spaces. It turns out that a number of interesting collections of subsets of the Baire space, such as the collection of Borel sets of a given type (e.g. the Fσ sets) or the collection of analytic sets, can be expressed as the range of an ω-ary Boolean operation applied to all possible ω-sequences of clopen sets. (Such collections are called clopen-ω-Boolean.) More recently, the ranges of I-ary Boolean operations for uncountable I have been considered; specific questions include whether the collection of Borel sets, or the collection of sets at finite levels in the Borel hierarchy, is clopen-I-Boolean.The main purpose of this paper is to give a characterization of those collections of subsets of the Baire space (or similar spaces) that are clopen-I-Boolean for some I. The Baire space version can be stated as follows: a collection of subsets of the Baire space is clopen-I-Boolean for some I iff it is nonempty and closed downward and σ-directed upward under Wadge reducibility, and in this case we may take I = ω2. The basic method of proof is to use discrete subsets of spaces of the form K2 to put a number of smaller clopen-I-Boolean classes together to form a large one. The final section of the paper gives converse results indicating that, at least in some cases, ω2 cannot be replaced by a smaller index set.


1975 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice Boffa

In this note we define a class of properties for which the following holds: If we can prove in NF that the property holds for the universe V, then we can prove in NF that it holds for every set equipollent to its power set.Definition. For any stratified formula A and any variable υ which does not occur in A, let Aυ be the formula obtained by replacing in A each quantifier (Qx) by the bounded quantifier (Qx ∈ SCi(υ)), where i is the type of x in A. We will say that a property P(υ) is typed when there is a stratified sentence S such that P(υ) ↔ Sυ holds in NF.Examples of typed properties are: “υ is Dedekind-infinite”, “υ is not well-orderable”. Specker [3] proved that these typed properties hold for the universe V, and C. Ward Henson [1] extended this result to any set equipollent to its power set. We will show that such an extension holds for any typed property.Theorem. For any typed property P(υ):Proof. Fix a bijective map h: υ → SC(υ) and define for i = 0, 1, 2, …, n, … a bijective map hi: υ → SCi(υ) as follows:For every formula A, let A(h) be obtained by replacing in A each atomic part (x ∈ y) by (x ∈ h(y)) and each quantifier (Qx) by (Qx ∈ υ).


1984 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 808-812
Author(s):  
Yoshihiro Abe

J. Barbanel [1] characterized the class of cardinals fixed by an elementary embedding induced by a normal ultrafilter on Pκλ assuming that κ is supercompact. In this paper we shall prove the same results from the weaker hypothesis that κ is strongly compact and the ultrafilter is fine.We work in ZFC throughout. Our set-theoretic notation is quite standard. In particular, if X is a set, ∣X∣ denotes the cardinality of X and P(X) denotes the power set of X. Greek letters will denote ordinals. In particular γ, κ, η and γ will denote cardinals. If κ and λ are cardinals, then λ<κ is defined to be supγ<κγγ. Cardinal exponentiation is always associated from the top. Thus, for example, 2λ<κ means 2(λ<κ). V denotes the universe of all sets. If M is an inner model of ZFC, ∣X∣M and P(X)M denote the cardinality of X in M and the power set of X in M respectively.We review the basic facts on fine ultrafilters and the corresponding elementary embeddings. (For detail, see [2].)Definition. Assume κ and λ are cardinals with κ ≤ λ. Then, Pκλ = {X ⊂ λ∣∣X∣ < κ}.It is important to note that ∣Pκλ∣ = λ< κ.


1983 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
William S. Heck

The set Λ of isols was extensively studied by Dekker and Myhill in [1]. Subsequently, Nerode [3] developed the theory of Λ(A), the set of isols relative to some recursively closed set of functions A.One of the main areas of interest of [1] was the natural partial order ≤ on Λ. In this paper we will examine some of the properties of ≤A on Λ(A). We use the following notations: ∣A∣ is the cardinality of the set A, ⊃ denotes strict inclusion, (a) is the power set of the set a, c is the cardinality of the continuum, and ω = {0, 1, 2, …}. The terms A-isol, A-immune, A-r.e., A-incomparable, etc. all refer to the usual meaning of these words, only taken in the context of the recursively closed set A. ReqA(a) is the A-r.e.t. of which a is a representative. By identifying a finite natural number with the A-r.e.t. consisting of sets of a given finite cardinality we see that ω ⊆ Λ(A); Λ(A) is said to be nontrivial iff ω ⊃ Λ(A). The three results proven in this paper are:Theorem 1. If Λ(A) is nontrivial, then ∣Λ(A)∣ = c.Theorem 2. If∣A∣ < c, then Λ(A) is nontrivial.Theorem 3. If ∣A∣ < c and ∣⊿∣ < c and ⊿ ⊆ Λ(A) − ω, then there is aΓ ⊆ Λ(A) − ω such that:(a) ∣Γ∣ = c.(b) Every member of Γ is A-incomparable with every member of Δ.(c) Any two distinct members of Γ are A-incomparable.


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