The Potential in Frege’s Theorem

Review of Symbolic Logic 16 (2):553-577 (2023)
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Abstract

Is a logicist bound to the claim that as a matter of analytic truth there is an actual infinity of objects? If Hume’s Principle is analytic then in the standard setting the answer appears to be yes. Hodes’s work pointed to a way out by offering a modal picture in which only a potential infinity was posited. However, this project was abandoned due to apparent failures of cross-world predication. We re-explore this idea and discover that in the setting of the potential infinite one can interpret first-order Peano arithmetic, but not second-order Peano arithmetic. We conclude that in order for the logicist to weaken the metaphysically loaded claim of necessary actual infinities, they must also weaken the mathematics they recover.

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Will Stafford
Kansas State University

Citations of this work

Finitary Upper Logicism.Bruno Jacinto - 2024 - Review of Symbolic Logic 17 (4):1172-1247.

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References found in this work

Modal Logic as Metaphysics.Timothy Williamson - 2013 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
What numbers could not be.Paul Benacerraf - 1965 - Philosophical Review 74 (1):47-73.
Philosophy and Model Theory.Tim Button & Sean P. Walsh - 2018 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Edited by Sean Walsh & Wilfrid Hodges.
From Frege to Gödel.Jean Van Heijenoort (ed.) - 1967 - Cambridge,: Harvard University Press.

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