Axioms of Set Theory - Objections To Set Theory As A Foundation For Mathematics

Objections To Set Theory As A Foundation For Mathematics

From set theory's inception, some mathematicians have objected to it as a foundation for mathematics. The most common objection to set theory, one Kronecker voiced in set theory's earliest years, starts from the constructivist view that mathematics is loosely related to computation. If this view is granted, then the treatment of infinite sets, both in naive and in axiomatic set theory, introduces into mathematics methods and objects that are not computable even in principle. Ludwig Wittgenstein questioned the way Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory handled infinities. Wittgenstein's views about the foundations of mathematics were later criticised by Georg Kreisel and Paul Bernays, and investigated by Crispin Wright, among others.

Category theorists have proposed topos theory as an alternative to traditional axiomatic set theory. Topos theory can interpret various alternatives to that theory, such as constructivism, finite set theory, and computable set theory.

Read more about this topic:  Axioms Of Set Theory

Famous quotes containing the words objections, set, theory, foundation and/or mathematics:

    Miss Western: Tell me, child, what objections can you have to the young gentleman?
    Sophie: A very solid objection, in my opinion. I hate him.
    Miss Western: Well, I have known many couples who have entirely disliked each other, lead very comfortable, genteel lives.
    John Osborne (1929–1994)

    Scholarship cannot do without literature.... It needs literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to all the race, to get it out of closets and into the brains of men who stir abroad.
    Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

    every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.
    Thomas Nagel (b. 1938)

    No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man’s subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman’s subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature.
    Susan B. Anthony (1820–1907)

    The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)