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The semantic inferentialist account of the social institution of semantic meaning can be naturally extended to account for social ontology. I argue here that semantic inferentialism provides a framework within which mathematical ontology can be understood as social ontology, and mathematical facts as socially instituted facts. I argue further that the semantic inferentialist framework provides resources to underpin at least some aspects of the objectivity of mathematics, even when the truth of mathematical claims is understood as socially instituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The injective version of Cantor's theorem appears in full second-order logic as the inconsistency of the abstraction principle, Frege's Basic Law V (BLV), an inconsistency easily shown using Russell's paradox. This incompatibility is akin to others—most notably that of a (Dedekind) infinite universe with the Nuisance Principle (NP) discussed by neo-Fregean philosophers of mathematics. This paper uses the Burali–Forti paradox to demonstrate this incompatibility, and another closely related, without appeal to principles related to the axiom of choice—a result hitherto unestablished. It discusses both the general interest of this result, its interest to neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics, and the potential significance of the Burali–Fortian method of proof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I offer an explicating interpretation of the procedure of content recarving as described by Frege in §64 of the Foundations of Arithmetic. I argue that the procedure of content recarving may be interpreted as an operation that while restricting the subject matter of a sentence, performs a generalization on what the sentence says about its subject matter. The characterization of the recarving operation is given in the setting of Yablo's theory of subject matter and it is based on the relation of determination between properties. The main advantage of the proposal is its generality, for it is applicable not just to the case of abstraction principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frege’s Grundgesetze was 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 the Grundgesetze formed 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 the Grundgesetze, and our main theorem (Theorem 2.9) shows that there is a model of a fragment of the Grundgesetze which 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 the Grundgesetze are examples of abstraction 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 FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper starts with an explanation of how the logicist research program can be approached within the framework of Leśniewski’s systems. One nice feature of the system is that Hume’s Principle is derivable in it from an explicit definition of natural numbers. I generalize this result to show that all predicative abstraction principles corresponding to second-level relations, which are provably equivalence relations, are provable. However, the system fails, despite being much neater than the construction of Principia Mathematica (PM). One of the key reasons is that, just as in the case of the system of PM, without the assumption that infinitely many objects exist, (renderings of) most of the standard axioms of Peano Arithmetic are not derivable in the system. I prove that introducing modal quantifiers meant to capture the intuitions behind potential infinity results in the (renderings of) axioms of Peano Arithmetic (PA) being valid in all relational models (i.e. Kripke-style models, to be defined later on) of the extended language. The second, historical part of the paper contains a user-friendly description of Leśniewski’s own arithmetic and a brief investigation into its properties.

One of the remarkable results of Frege's Logicism is Frege's Theorem, which holds that one can derive the main truths of Peano arithmetic from Hume's Principle (HP) without using Frege's Basic Law V. This result was rediscovered by the Neo-Fregeans and their allies. However, when applied in developing a more advanced theory of mathematics, their fundamental principles--the abstraction principles--incur some problems, e.g., that of inflation. This paper finds alternative paths for such inquiry in extensionalism and object theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the neo-logicist approach to the foundations of mathematics by highlighting an issue that arises from looking at the Bad Company objection from an epistemological perspective. For the most part, our issue is independent of the details of any resolution of the Bad Company objection and, as we will show, it concerns other foundational approaches in the philosophy of mathematics. In the first two sections, we give a brief overview of the “Scottish” neo-logicist school, present a generic form of the Bad Company objection and introduce an epistemic issue connected to this general problem that will be the focus of the rest of the paper. In the third section, we present an alternative approach within philosophy of mathematics, a view that emerges from Hilbert’s Grundlagen der Geometrie (1899, Leipzig: Teubner; Foundations of geometry (trans.: Townsend, E.). La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1959.). We will argue that Bad Company-style worries, and our concomitant epistemic issue, also affects this conception and other foundationalist approaches. In the following sections, we then offer various ways to address our epistemic concern, arguing, in the end, that none resolves the issue. The final section offers our own resolution which, however, runs against the foundationalist spirit of the Scottish neo-logicist program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is concerned with the bad company problem as an instance of a more general difficulty in the philosophy of mathematics. The paper focuses on the prospects of stability as a necessary condition on acceptability. However, the conclusion of the paper is largely negative. As a solution to the bad company problem, stability would undermine the prospects of a neo-Fregean foundation for set theory, and, as a solution to the more general difficulty, it would impose an unreasonable constraint on mathematical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]