[FOM] Might there be no inaccessible cardinals?
Vaughan Pratt
pratt at cs.stanford.edu
Fri Nov 2 02:03:05 EDT 2007
I ran across an interesting paper by Jesus Mosterin titled "How set
theory impinges on logic" at
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001620/01/How_Set_Theory_Impinges_on_Logic.pdf
The following sentence caught my eye.
"In ZFC we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of inaccessible
cardinals."
Can anyone (Mosterin perhaps?--I don't have his email address) enlighten
me as to the meaning of "cannot" ("can neither") here?
In the case of "prove" there is no question: "cannot" means it is
impossible, since there are models of ZFC too small to include an
inaccessible cardinal.
At first I assumed that he meant the same for "disprove." But I
couldn't immediately come up with an equally convincing argument, nor
was Google of much help.
Has this been shown? Or did Mosterin merely mean that we can't
*currently* disprove the existence of inaccessible cardinals?
Vaughan Pratt
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