Thomas Forster

In general little thought is given to the general question of how to implement mathematical objects in set theory. It is clear that—at various times in the past—people have gone to considerable lengths to devise implementations with nice properties. There is a litera- ture on the evolution of the Wiener-Kuratowski ordered pair, and a discussion by Quine of the merits of an ordered-pair implemen- tation that makes every set an ordered pair. The implementation of ordinals as Von Neumann ordinals is so attractive that it is uni- versally used in all set theories which have enough replacement to prove Mostowski’s collapse lemma. I have frequently complained in the past about the widespread habit of referring to implementations of pairs (ordinals etc) as definitions of pairs (etc). My point here is a different one: generally little attention has been paid to the question of what makes an implementation a good implementation. In most cases of interest the merits of the candidates are uncontroversial. What I want to examine here is an example where there are com- peting implementations for ordered pairs, and—although it is clear to the cognoscenti and also (with a bit of arm-waving) plausible to the logician in the street that some of the impossible candidates are impossible, nobody has ever given a satisfactory explanation of why this is so

Applications of game-theoretic semantics à la Hintikka can be extended from Lower Predicate Calculus to languages with branching quantifiers. When one does this, issues which in the LPC could be swept under the carpet suddenly cause unwelcome subtleties. It turns out that which formulae of the branching quantifier logic one accounts true comes to depend on whether one requires that the winning strategies for Team Eloïse in the Hintikka game be deterministic (or allows them to be nondeterministic). The set of valid formulae is affected similarly. © 2011 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.