The Truth about Truth
MW: A little while back, I noted something delicious about the history of mathematical logic:
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MW: Recap: we showed that PAT implies ΦT, where ΦT is the set of all formulas
Now we have to show the converse, that PA+ΦT implies PAT. But first let’s wave our hands, hopefully shaking off some intuition, like a dog shaking off water.
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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.)
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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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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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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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[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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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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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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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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Diagonal Argument 