Abstract. The principle of covering reflection holds of a cardinal κ if for every structure B in a countable first-order language there is a structure A of size less than κ, such that B is covered by elementary images of A in B. Is there any such cardinal? Is the principle consistent? Does it have large cardinal strength? This is joint work with myself, Nai-Chung Hou, Andreas Lietz, and Farmer Schlutzenberg.
The talk will reportedly streamed online, so kindly contact the organizers for access.
I will be staying in Madison for a few days to talk logic with researchers there.
Abstract. I shall present a new flexible method showing that every countable model of PA admits a pointwise definable-elementary end-extension. Also, any model of PA of size at most continuum admits an extension that is Leibnizian, meaning that any two distinct points are separated by some expressible property. Similar results hold in set theory, where one can also achieve V=L in the extension, or indeed any suitable theory holding in an inner model of the original model.
UW Madison Logic Seminar, Joel David Hamkins, April 4, 2023
The talk will be held online via Zoom ID: 998 6013 7362.
Abstract. It is a mystery often mentioned in the foundations of mathematics that our best and strongest mathematical theories seem to be linearly ordered and indeed well-ordered by consistency strength. Given any two of the familiar large cardinal hypotheses, for example, generally one of them proves the consistency of the other. Why should this be? The phenomenon is seen as significant for the philosophy of mathematics, perhaps pointing us toward the ultimately correct mathematical theories. And yet, we know as a purely formal matter that the hierarchy of consistency strength is not well-ordered. It is ill-founded, densely ordered, and nonlinear. The statements usually used to illustrate these features are often dismissed as unnatural or as Gödelian trickery. In this talk, I aim to overcome that criticism—as well as I am able to—by presenting a variety of natural hypotheses that reveal ill-foundedness in consistency strength, density in the hierarchy of consistency strength, and incomparability in consistency strength.
The talk should be generally accessible to university logic students, requiring little beyond familiarity with the incompleteness theorem and some elementary ideas from computability theory.
