Aristotelian Logic, Axioms, and Abstraction

Abstract

Stewart Shapiro and Alan Weir have argued that a crucial part of the demonstration of Frege's theorem (specifically, that Hume's principle implies that there are infinitely many objects) fails if the neo-logicist cannot assume the existence of the empty property, i.e., is restricted to so-called Aristotelian logic. Nevertheless, even in the context of Aristotelian logic, Hume's principle implies much of the content of peano arithmetic. In addition, their results do not constitute an objection to neo-logicism so much as a clarification regarding the view of logic that the neo-logicist must take.

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