MW: OK, back to the main plotline. Enayat asks for a “natural” axiomatization of PAT. Personally, I don’t find PAT all that “unnatural”, but he needs this for Theorem 7. (It’s been a while, so remember that Enayat’s T is a recursively axiomatizable extension of ZF.)
Category Archives: Peano Arithmetic
Non-standard Models of Arithmetic 12
JB: It’s been a long time since Part 11, so let me remind myself what we’re talking about in Enayat’s paper Standard models of arithmetic.
We’ve got a theory T that’s a recursively axiomatizable extension of ZF. We can define the ‘standard model’ of PA in any model of T, and we call this a ‘T-standard model’ of PA. Then, we let PAT to be all the closed formulas in the language of Peano arithmetic that hold in all T-standard models.
This is what Enayat wants to study: the stuff about arithmetic that’s true in all T-standard models of the natural numbers. So what does he do first?
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Non-standard Models of Arithmetic 11
MW: Time to start on Enayat’s paper in earnest. First let’s review his notation. M is a model of T, a recursively axiomatizable extension of ZF. He writes 
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Non-Standard Models of Arithmetic 10
JB: So, last time you sketched the proof of the Paris–Harrington theorem. Your description is packed with interesting ideas, which will take me a long time to absorb. Someday I should ask some questions about them. But for now I’d like to revert to an earlier theme: how questions about the universe of sets cast their shadows down on the world of Peano arithmetic.
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Non-standard Models of Arithmetic 9
[In Post 21, Bruce Smith and I discuss the proof of the Paris-Harrington theorem.]
MW: Time to talk about the Paris-Harrington theorem. Originally I thought I’d give a “broad strokes” proof, but then I remembered what you once wrote: keep it fun, not a textbook. Anyway, Katz and Reimann do a nice job for someone who wants to dive into the details, without signing up for a full-bore grad course in model theory. So I’ll say a bit about the “cast of characters” (i.e., central ideas), and why I think they merit our attention.
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Non-standard Models of Arithmetic 8
JB: So, you were going to tell me a bit how questions about the universe of sets cast their shadows down on the world of Peano arithmetic.
MW: Yup. There are few ways to approach this. Mainly I want to get to the Paris-Harrington theorem, which Enayat name-checks.
First though I should do some table setting of my own. There’s a really succinct way to compare ZF with PA: PA = ZF − infinity!
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Non-standard Models of Arithmetic 7
MW: Our goal for the next few posts is to understand Enayat’s paper
• Ali Enayat, Standard models of arithmetic.
JB: Yee-hah!
MW: I’m going to take a leisurely approach, with “day trips” to nearby attractions (or Sehenswürdigkeiten, in the delightful German phrase), but still trying not to miss our return flight.
Also, I know you know a lot of this stuff. But unless we’re the only two reading this (in which case, why not just email?), I won’t worry about what you know. I’ll just pretend I’m explaining it to a younger version of myself—the one who often murmured, “Future MW, just what does this mean?”
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Non-standard Models of Arithmetic 6
JB: It’s interesting to see how you deploy various philosophies of mathematics: Platonism, intuitionism, formalism, etc. For a long time I’ve been disgusted by how people set up battles between these, like Punch-and-Judy shows where little puppets whack each other, instead of trying to clarify what any of these philosophies might actually mean.
For example, some like to whack Platonism for its claim that numbers “really exist”, without investigating what it might mean for an abstraction—a Platonic form—to “really exist”. If you define “really exist” in such a way that abstractions don’t do this, that’s fine—but it doesn’t mean you’ve defeated Platonism, it merely means you’re committed to a different way of thinking and talking.
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Non-standard Models of Arithmetic 5
MW: John, you wrote:
Roughly, my dream is to show that “the” standard model is a much more nebulous notion than many seem to believe.
and you gave a good elucidation in post 2 and post 4. But I’d like to defend my right to “true arithmetic” and “the standard model ℕ”.
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Non-standard Models of Arithmetic 4
MW: I wrote: “I don’t like calling the omega of a model of ZF a standard model, for philosophical reasons I won’t get into.”
JB: I like it, because I don’t like the idea of “the” standard model of arithmetic, so I’m happy to see that “the” turned into an “a”.
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Diagonal Argument 