FOM: Category or collection; chicken or egg? (Correction)

Solomon Feferman sf at Csli.Stanford.EDU
Thu Nov 20 02:51:45 EST 1997


[Correction to last paragraph:]
         ...............................................

And, I must repeat for Vaughan's sake, I do not mean 'collection' in the
sense of 'set' or 'class' in an axiomatic theory like ZF.  I mean it in an
informal pre-axiomatic sense, which could be clarified in various
ways by axiomatic foundations, but not necessarily founded in terms of
something more basic.  The general notions of collection and operation
seem to me to constitute an irreducible minimum of abstract mathematical 
thought.  It is quite another matter to ask: "Which collections exist?"
and "Which operations exist?"  and nothing in the above pretends to answer
these.





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