The Strength of Abstraction with Predicative Comprehension
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 an abstraction principle, while another paradigmatic example is Basic Law V from Frege's Grundgesetze. 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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1407.3860,
title = {The Strength of Abstraction with Predicative Comprehension},
author = {Sean Walsh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.3860},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Forthcoming in Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. Slight change in title from previous version, at request of referees