English

The Strength of Abstraction with Predicative Comprehension

Logic 2015-11-16 v4

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

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:04:06.435Z