Comment by SabrinaJewson

Comment by SabrinaJewson 4 days ago

2 replies

I’m not sure what you mean by “theorems remain the same”. If you take away induction from Peano arithmetic, you get Robinson arithmetic, which has many more models, including (from https://math.stackexchange.com/a/4076545):

- ℕ ∪ {∞}

- Cardinal arithmetic

- ℤ[x]⁺

Obviously, not all theorems that are true for the natural numbers are true for cardinals, so it seems misleading to say that theorems remain the same. I also believe that the addition of induction increases the consistency strength of the theory, so it’s not “just” a matter of expressing the theorems in a different way.

I would agree more for axioms that don’t affect consistency strength, like foundation or choice (over the rest of the ZF axioms).

woopsn 4 days ago

If I had to write again I might say "same theorems about natural numbers" and capitalize ROUGHLY. It is a conversation, what exactly I am weaseling around (not just nonstandard model theoretic issues), and I take your caveat about consistency strength - with that said would you still call it misleading? Why is it that eg x+y=y+x for x y given takes exponential length proof in Robinson compared to PA? For the reason stated, which is true in a very broad sense.