Second-order characterizable cardinals and ordinals (Q861573)

The paper is concerned with the characterizability of cardinals and ordinals in second-order logic. Roughly, a structure \(A\) of given signature is (2nd-order) infinitely characterizable iff there is a set \(\Phi\) of sentences of second-order logic (in the given signature) such that \(A\) is a model of \(\Phi\) iff all models of \(\Phi\) are isomorphic to \(A\). If \(\Phi\) is given in a monadic language (\(\Phi\) is finite), one obtains a corresponding notion of monadic (finite) second-order characterizability. The special case where, for any given cardinal \(k\) greater than 0, only the structure consisting of the domain of cardinality \(k\) is considered, leads to the notion of cardinal characterizability. Finally, if one considers structures of the form \((\alpha, \in)\), where \(\alpha >0\), is an ordinal, one naturally has second-order ordinal characterizability. In the finite case, \(k\) is finitely second-order characterizable iff \(k\) is the only element of the spectrum of some second-order sentence \(\varphi\) (Scholz's original notion of the spectrum of \(\varphi\) being simply the set of natural numbers which are cardinals of finite models of \(\varphi\)). As to the content, the paper offers a thorough investigation of the connection between ordinal and cardinal characterizability (Section 2) since Garland's thesis (1967) to recent work of Weaver. Just to give a flavour of the results, one can prove that if the ordinal \(\alpha\) is (finitely or infinitely) characterizable, so is \(\aleph_\alpha\). In Section 3 the author proves the so-called Fraenkel-Carnap property for ordinals, i.e. an ordinal is finitely characterizable iff its second-order theory is finitely axiomatizable. In Section 4 closure of the finitely and infinitely characterizable cardinals under arithmetical operations are considered (e.g., under exponential). Section 5 investigates relations between ordinal arithmetic and ordinal characterizability (e.g., closure under successor, addition, multiplication). Section 6 compares the different notions of characterizability; Section 7 is concerned with open problems.