[FOM] AXIOM SCHEMATA

John McCarthy jmc at steam.stanford.edu
Tue Jul 13 15:40:07 EDT 2004


> Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2004 23:42:22 -0500 (CDT)
> From: Matthew Frank <mfrank at math.uchicago.edu>
> 
> Given that we generally prefer finitely axiomatized theories to infinitely
> axiomatized theories, why do we tend to use ZF instead of NBG?  --Matt

If a person or a computer program is to do mathematics *in* an
axiomatized set theory, ZF is better than NBG.  There is the hard
problem of inventing the predicates used in the comprehension schema,
but I'll bet it's much harder to invent the combinations of set
forming operations required to get the same result in NBG.



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