Open Access
2005 Frege's Other Program
Aldo Antonelli, Robert May
Notre Dame J. Formal Logic 46(1): 1-17 (2005). DOI: 10.1305/ndjfl/1107220671

Abstract

Frege's logicist program requires that arithmetic be reduced to logic. Such a program has recently been revamped by the "neologicist" approach of Hale and Wright. Less attention has been given to Frege's extensionalist program, according to which arithmetic is to be reconstructed in terms of a theory of extensions of concepts. This paper deals just with such a theory. We present a system of second-order logic augmented with a predicate representing the fact that an object x is the extension of a concept C, together with extra-logical axioms governing such a predicate, and show that arithmetic can be obtained in such a framework. As a philosophical payoff, we investigate the status of the so-called Hume's Principle and its connections to the root of the contradiction in Frege's system.

Citation

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Aldo Antonelli. Robert May. "Frege's Other Program." Notre Dame J. Formal Logic 46 (1) 1 - 17, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1305/ndjfl/1107220671

Information

Published: 2005
First available in Project Euclid: 31 January 2005

zbMATH: 1098.03009
MathSciNet: MR2131544
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1305/ndjfl/1107220671

Subjects:
Primary: 03A05
Secondary: 00A30 , 03B15 , 03B30 , 03F35

Keywords: arithmetic , Frege , Hume's Principle , logicism , neologicism

Rights: Copyright © 2005 University of Notre Dame

Vol.46 • No. 1 • 2005
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