Type reducing correspondences and well-orderings: Frege's and Zermelo's constructions re-examined

Abstract

A key idea in both Frege's development of arithmetic in the Grundlagen [7] and Zermelo's 1904 proof [10] of the well-ordering theorem is that of a “type reducing” correspondence between second-level and first-level entities. In Frege's construction, the correspondence obtains between concept and number, in Zermelo's (through the axiom of choice), between set and member. In this paper, a formulation is given and a detailed investigation undertaken of a system ℱ of many-sorted first-order logic (first outlined in the Appendix to [6]) in which this notion of type reducing correspondence is accorded a central role and which enables Frege's and Zermelo's constructions to be presented in such a way as to reveal their essential similarity. By adapting Bourbaki's version of Zermelo's proof of the well-ordering theorem, we show that, within ℱ, any correspondence c between second-level entities (here called concepts) and first-level ones (here called objects) induces a well-ordering relation W (c) in a canonical manner. We shall see that, when c is the “Fregean” correspondence between concepts and cardinal numbers, W (c) is (the well-ordering of) the ordinal ω + 1, and when c is a “Zermelian” choice function on concepts, W (c) is a well-ordering of the universal concept embracing all objects.In ℱ an important role is played by the notion of extension of a concept. To each concept X we assume there is assigned an object e(X) in such a way that, for any concepts X, Y satisfying a certain predicate E, we have e (X) = e (Y) iff the same objects fall under X and Y.