Russell Schema and Paradox

PART 2. Burali-Forti’s paradox.

(test video)
Burali-Forti’s Paradox
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Burali-Forti’s paradox
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All about ordinals
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Ordinals are not scary
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In fact, they are quite ordinary
Burali-Forti’s Paradox
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Let’s look at an ordering of fast food restaurants
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McDonalds is worse than Taco Bell
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Taco Bell is worse than In-n-Out Burger
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The ordering thus is:
– McDonalds < Taco Bell < In-n-Out Burger
Burali-Forti’s Paradox
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Let’s look at an ordering of colors
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Blue is worse than Green
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Green is worse than Purple
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The ordering thus is:
– Blue < Green < Purple
Burali-Forti’s Paradox
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These two orderings involve very different things
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Fast food restaurants vs. colors
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But, if we ignore what the objects are, the orderings are
exactly the same:
– o<o<o
– o<o<o
Burali-Forti’s Paradox
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Ordinals are the canonical representations of orderings
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Both the orderings of the previous slides have the same
order type, or corresponding ordinal
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In modern set theory, each ordinal is defined as the set of
previous ordinals
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And any set, with only ordinals, without any gaps, is itself
an ordinal!
Burali-Forti’s Paradox
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OK. What’s the paradox?
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Consider the set of all ordinals.
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It’s the set of all ordinals without any gaps.
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So it’s an ordinal.
Burali-Forti’s Paradox
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It’s an ordinal, so it’s a member of itself (set of ALL
ordinals)
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So it’s an ordinal previous to itself.
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But this is impossible. No ordinal is previous to itself.
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Paradox!