Which pattern does set theory study?

This post originates from a question I read on stackexchange. If we assume that the structuralist thesis is true, saying that mathematics is really the study of patterns and nothing else, where does this leave set theory? We have some intuition about number theory studying the pattern of natural numbers, real analysis about the reals and so on, but prima facie it seems that set theory doesn’t fit patterns in the same way. One might start off with the naive answer that set theory studies the pattern of sets – but then we encounter the classical paradoxes. If we instead fix ourselves on ZFC, how come set theory studies (almost exclusively) objects independent of ZFC?

DLO’s III – from rational to real

From the last two posts we managed to prove both the existence and the uniqueness of the rationals, which could be done by explicit definitions using known facts about the natural numbers. However, we also showed that the property that distinguished the real numbers from the rationals, namely completeness, couldn’t be defined in first-order logic. This also means that we can’t proceed to prove the existence of the reals in a direct matter as the rationals, and we will do so by indirect means. Continue reading

DLO’s II – uniqueness of rationals

Now that we’ve proven that the rationals exist, we would like to know if it would make a difference had we picked another representative of the countable DLO’s without endpoints as our rationals. Would any candidate have been suitable or is our choice of $\left<\mathbb{Q},\prec_\mathbb{Q}\right>$ special? Continue reading

DLO’s I – existence of the rationals

One of the very first things we learn at higher math education is the different kinds of number sets, e.g. the naturals, rationals and reals. These are however just taken for granted, and we merely assume that these actually exist and are well-defined. I’ll spend the next few blog posts to characterize the rationals and the reals from facts known from the natural numbers alone. This post will be dedicated to proving the existence of the rationals Continue reading

Is mathematics a posteriori?

The general consensus among mathematical philosophers (or philosophical mathematicians, for that matter) is that mathematics is a priori – independent of experience. However, a flourishing contemporary branch within the philosophy of mathematics is that of structuralism, which I will explain in detail in a little bit. Advocates of the structuralist approach are e.g. Shapiro [1] and Resnik [2], who argue how this approach answers a lot of important philosophical questions, including Resnik’s way of answering how mathematics can have applications in the physical world. There is a catch however: he assumes that mathematics is a posteriori – dependent of experience – contrary to popular belief.

The unstable pillar

When reading about the foundations of mathematics, one is bound to stumble upon the notion of “the four pillars of the foundations of mathematics”; namely, proof theory, model theory, recursion theory and axiomatic set theory. But what exactly is it about these areas that makes them get this prestigious title? One can argue that these “pillars” have a metamathematical nature, in that they try to describe methods of existing mathematics instead of describing elements of the mathematical realm. Proof theory about the way of proofs, model theory about how we construct new structures and recursion theory deals with questions about which parts of mathematics can be computed. I would argue that the last “pillar”, axiomatic set theory, does not fall into this category of metamathematics.