The continuum hypothesis in intuitionism

Although Brouwer became famous for his vehement attacks upon classical logic and set theory, his work did not develop in a vacuum and strongly depended on that of Cantor.His mind bent on shifting aside nonconstructive arguments, he tried to rebuild Cantor's edifice along new, intuitionistic lines. The continuum hypothesis, lying at the core of set theory, also confronted Brouwer, and he had to face the farthest conclusion Cantor had been able to reach in trying to solve it: every nondenumerable closed subset of the real line has the power of the continuum.Brouwer's thinking about it seems to have been subject to some development. In 1914 we hear him saying: “Wir sahen oben dass das Cantorsche Haupttheorem für den Intuitionisten keines Beweises bedarf” (“As we saw above, for us, being intuitionists, Cantor's Main Theorem does not need a proof”) [3]. Nevertheless, five years later, he publishes an essay: Theorie der Punktmengen, which might be described as an attempt to reconstruct Cantor's reasonings in detail [4].This attempt was not entirely successful, as Brouwer comes to admit in 1952, probably having lost, now, some of his youthful rashness [10]. So the question of what the constructive content of Cantor's Main Theorem is, still awaits an answer.We do not think the answer we will give can be considered a conclusive one, but, in any case, it is a beginning.