Search

Abstract: This paper presents a systematic study of the prehistory of the traditional subsystems of second-order arithmetic that feature prominently in the reverse mathematics program promoted by Friedman and Simpson. We look in particular at: (i) the long arc from Poincaré to Feferman as concerns arithmetic definability and provability, (ii) the interplay between finitism and the formalization of analysis in the lecture notes and publications of Hilbert and Bernays, (iii) the uncertainty as to the constructive status of principles equivalent to Weak König’s Lemma, and (iv) the large-scale intellectual backdrop to arithmetical transfinite recursion in descriptive set theory and its effectivization by Borel, Lusin, Addison, and others.

Abstract: Frege’sGrundgesetzewas one of the 19th century forerunners to contemporary set theory which was plagued by the Russell paradox. In recent years, it has been shown that subsystems of theGrundgesetzeformed by restricting the comprehension schema are consistent. One aim of this paper is to ascertain how much set theory can be developed within these consistent fragments of theGrundgesetze, and our main theorem (Theorem 2.9) shows that there is a model of a fragment of theGrundgesetzewhich defines a model of all the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the exception of the power set axiom. The proof of this result appeals to Gödel’s constructible universe of sets and to Kripke and Platek’s idea of the projectum, as well as to a weak version of uniformization (which does not involve knowledge of Jensen’s fine structure theory). The axioms of theGrundgesetzeare examples ofabstraction principles, and the other primary aim of this paper is to articulate a sufficient condition for the consistency of abstraction principles with limited amounts of comprehension (Theorem 3.5). As an application, we resolve an analogue of the joint consistency problem in the predicative setting.

Abstract: Frege’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).

This paper presents new constructions of models of Hume's Principle and BasicLaw V with restricted amounts of comprehension. The techniques used in theseconstructions are drawn from hyperarithmetic theory and the model theory offields, and formalizing these techniques within various subsystems ofsecond-order Peano arithmetic allows one to put upper and lower bounds on theinterpretability strength of these theories and hence to compare these theoriesto the canonical subsystems of second-order arithmetic. The main results ofthis paper are: (i) there is a consistent extension of the hyperarithmeticfragment of Basic Law V which interprets the hyperarithmetic fragment ofsecond-order Peano arithmetic, and (ii) the hyperarithmetic fragment of Hume'sPrinciple does not interpret the hyperarithmetic fragment of second-order Peanoarithmetic, so that in this specific sense there is no predicative version ofFrege's Theorem.