18 research outputs found
Categorical characterizations of the natural numbers require primitive recursion
Simpson and the second author asked whether there exists a characterization
of the natural numbers by a second-order sentence which is provably categorical
in the theory RCA. We answer in the negative, showing that for any
characterization of the natural numbers which is provably true in WKL,
the categoricity theorem implies induction. On the other hand, we
show that RCA does make it possible to characterize the natural numbers
categorically by means of a set of second-order sentences. We also show that a
certain -conservative extension of RCA admits a provably
categorical single-sentence characterization of the naturals, but each such
characterization has to be inconsistent with WKL+superexp.Comment: 17 page