Cantor's Abstractionism and Hume's Principle. Issue 3 (3rd July 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ternullo, Claudio; Zanetti, Luca
• Is Part Of: History and philosophy of logic. Volume 43:Issue 3(2022)
• Page Start: 284
• Page End: 300
• Publication Date: 2022-07-03
• Subjects: Logic -- Periodicals; 160.905
• DOI: 10.1080/01445340.2021.1954471
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0144-5340

Abstract

Abstract : Richard Kimberly Heck and Paolo Mancosu have claimed that the possibility of non-Cantorian assignments of cardinalities to infinite concepts shows that Hume's Principle (HP) is not implicit in the concept of cardinal number. Neologicism would therefore be threatened by the 'good company' HP is kept by such alternative assignments. In his review of Mancosu's book, Bob Hale argues, however, that 'getting different numerosities for different countable infinite collections depends on taking the groups in a certain order – but it is of the essence of cardinal numbers that the cardinal size of a collection does not depend upon how its members are ordered'. This paper's goal is to implement Hale's response to the Good Company problem by producing a Cantorian argument for HP. In Section 2, we present the Heck-Mancosu argument against neologicism. In Section 3, we discuss Hale's defence of Hume's Principle. In Section 4, we discuss Cantor's abstractionist definitions of number. In Section 5, we argue that good abstraction must comply with what we call 'Gödel's Minimal Account of Abstraction' (GMAA). We finally show (Sections 5 and 6) that non-Cantorian theories of cardinality fail to satisfy GMAA.