Recantation or Any old w-sequence would do after all

PAUL BENACERRAF*

He told me that around 1886 he had discovered a novel system of numeration that in a very few days he had been able to extend to twentyfour thousand... He then applied this extravagant principle to the other numbers. Instead of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Mdximo P6rex, instead of seven thousand fourteen, The Railroad; other numbers were Luis Melidn Lafuinir, Olimar, sulphur, Clubs, the whale, the gas, the cauldron, Napoleon, Augustm de Vedia. Instead of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had its own special sign, a kind of mark; the last were very complicated... I tried to explain to him that this rhapsody of unconnected signs was precisely the contrary of a system of numeration Jorge Luis Borges1

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The structuralist's cri de guerrethat mathematics is the study of (abstract) structurescould befleshedout in a number of ways, corresponding to the myriad interpretations that could be put on 'abstract' and 'structures', as well as every boolean combination thereof. But 'structure' is ambiguous between the object ('structurei')and its structure2, namely its structural properties: the Empire State Building, although a paradigmatic concrete object, is an imposing structure!, as is the union of the Re for all a < N^,, as is K, the structurei of the real numbers between 0 and 1; whereas it is also true that the structure^ of the Empire State Building has never been repeated in any other building, despite its spectacular and pioneering success there. Accordingly, some structuralists use the motto to distance themselves from those who see mathematics as the study of the properties of certain 'specific' collections of objects [structuresi; sets; natural, real, or imaginary numbers, etc... ], perhaps out of a conviction (which I once shared) that there couldn't be any objects that have just the prop Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, Princeton, N. J., 08544 U. S. A. 1 My translation of a passage from 'Funee, the Memorious' as that appears in Borges, Fundacion Banco de Boston, Buenos Aires 1987, p. 228. I am grateful to Kathryn Trapp for having called the passage to my attention; it is quoted in her essay 'Modulo X or a Rhapsody of Incoherent Terms', unpublished. PHILOSOPHIA MATHEMATICA (3) Vol. 4 (1996), pp. 184-189.

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erties that these "objects" are supposed to have2or for reasons that are metaphysically much more innocuous. Others, metaphysically more wimpy (or at least, impartial), represent mathematical theories as being about structures2the structural or relational features that systems of "objects" might exhibit, without any special concern about whether there are or could be any systems of objects that indeed exhibit them, agnosticism on this matter being much of the point of the view. The metaphysical "purist", on at least one conception of purity, is often a sort of nominalist who will countenance any and all "concrete" structuresi and cheerfully study their structural properties. The purist might even go so far as to countenance the study of structural properties in the abstract, i.e., without considering whether they are instantiated by any concrete structures!a metaphysical stretch that is sometimes attempted by resorting to modal idiom3 in order to talk of possible concrete instantiations of abstract structuresi.e., possible structuresiwhile claiming ontological economy. Happily, we can study structures^ 2) without entering into that metaphysical debate; but certain issues will arise no matter what position one takes on the metaphysical front, particularly issues that pertain to the detail of the structure^ exhibited by any structurei of a certain kind. The present note concerns one such issue and is, perhaps for that reason, less about structuralism per se than about some of structures that are dear to the hearts of structuralists. Some years ago4 I argued (against Quine and
2 Cf. 'What Numbers Could Not Be1, The Philosophical ReviewLXXTV (1965), reprinted in Philosophy of Mathematics, Selected Readings, 2nd Edition', P. Benacerraf and H. Putnam (eds.), Cambridge University Press 1983 [henceforth, 'B&P'], esp. pp. 290 fT; page references are to the B&P edition. 3 The Joe us clasaicus for this interesting suggestion is Hilary Putnam, in 'Mathematics Without Foundations' [Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967); reprinted in B&P] to wit: ... if one is puzzled by the question recently raised by Benacerraf: how numbers can be "objects" if they have no properties except order in a particular ^-sequence, then I believe one can be helped by the answer: call them "objects" if you Uke (in the sense of being things one can quantify over); but remember that these objects have the special property that each fact about them is, in an equivalent formulation, simply a fact about any w-sequence. "Numbers exist"; but all this comes to, for mathematics, anyway, is that (1) w-sequences are possible (mathematically speaking); and (2) there are necessary truths of the form 'If a is an w-sequence, then...' (whether any concrete example of an ^-sequence exists or not). [Putnam, in B&P, p. 301] On this view, the contents of a mathematical theory or proposition can be equivalently represented by different forms of accountone in which It is seen as being about objects and another in which it seen as elaborating the properties of possible structures. The two interpretations constitute 'equivalent descriptions' of the (mathematical) phenomena. Geoffrey Hellman presents a valiant and detailed elaboration of the modal component of this view in Mathematics Without Numbers, Clarendon Press, 1989. The metaphysical consequences of the thought that the two constitute equivalent descriptions of the same mathematical phenomena are interestingly pursued by Mark Kalderon in Structure and the concept of number [Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton, (1995)]. 4 In 'What Numbers Could Not Be', pp. 275-277 and footnote 3.

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others) that in giving an account of number, it was not enough simply (a) to supply an w-sequence with which to identify the numbers and (b) to meet Russell's quite proper demand that we explain cardinality; to be usable in the way we use the numbers, a structurei supplied in response to (a) had to meet a third condition: it had to be recursive.5 The thought was that a sequence whose ordering (<) relation was not effectively calculable could not possibly meet our needs: It is a feature of our numbers that, for any two numbers m and n, we can tell "by inspection" whether or not m < n, a condition that (I argued) could not be met if < were not a decidable relation. I illustrated the point citing a particular non-recursive well-ordering of the integersan w-sequencethat I argued would, for that reason, not be usable by us for the more mundane purposes for which we tend to use numbers, e.g., counting finite sets. This was because, on most people's views, at least,6 we are finite beings and our finiteness leaves us without the needed resources suitably to master an ordering relation among numbers that was itself "uncomputable". It would leave us without a ready means of telling, for example, which of our numbers is the nthindeed, starting from any given one, even which cornea next Yet, that is precisely what we need to know when we are counting an n-membered set, such as a herd of platypuses, if we are reliably to reach the verdict that there are n platypusesi.e., if we are to associate the cardinal number n with the set of platypuses when and only when there are n platypuses in the set. For there are n platypuses iff there is a 1-1 correspondence between the platypuses and the cardinal numbers < n. I soon realized that I had blundered and wrote a retraction, which I should have published forthwith; but the point never seemed worth the effort (maybe I hoped the blunder would never be discovered), and it lay in a drawer until several moves eventually disappeared it. But because the view has been picked up by a number of authors, to the point of misleading them into agreement,7 I feel I should come clean. Here, by my present
Strictly speaking, when dealing with sequences of non-numbers, It may be best to speak, limtjmrl of recursive sequences, of sequences whose ordering relations have characteristic functions that are decidable, since 'recursive', on most renderings, applies to numerical functions, sets, and relations. Also, for the cognoscenti, we are assuming Church's Thesis; nothing of substance In the present note will hang on any differences anyone might suggest may exist between effective calculabillty and recursiveness. The point 1B not that subtle.
6 There are exceptions: J. R. Lucas, In his celebrated article 'Minds, Machines, and GodeT; Gddel himself, at least on some Interpretations of some dark sayings [I have in mind his brief remarks entitled 'On a Philosophical Error in the Work of A. M. Turing', typescript and, to my knowledge, still unpublished], and most recently, Roger Penrose, In Tie Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics, [Oxford University Press, 1989] and A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, [Oxford University Press, 1994]. 7 5

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One who may not have been taken In is Saul Kripke, who tells me that he discussed

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lights at least, is what was wrong with that argument.8 The argument began with the presentation of a non-recursive sequence, so let us do that and see if the rest of it goes throughi.e., if the sequence proposed can be made to render service as the numbers. Let V be your favorite non-recursive (countable) setfor reasons of Church doctrine, mine is the set of Godel numbers (under a suitable numbering) of the logically valid (i.e., true under every interpretation in every non-empty domain) sentences of a fixed standard First Order Language [you don't need to know which]. Define the sequence X (X = xo,xi,x2,.. . ,x n ,...) as the elements of V arranged in order of magnitudegiven any two members x< and Xj of V, Xj < x Xj iff t < j . 9 Of course, given any two numbers m and n, without restriction to membership in V, m <x n iff m, n V and m < n. So, as defined, X is not a recursive well-ordering, as an "oracle" for
this argument at some length, as well as other aspects of the views I presented in 'What Numbers Could Not Be', In a seminar at Princeton in 1989-90, as well as in a number of other lectures. 8 Ironically enough, the germ of the present response [which I thank Mark Kalderon for spurring me to resurrect] Is contained In the first few sentences of the very footnote that sets out the offending argument: There is, of course, a difficulty with the notion of 'knowing which numbers two expressions designate'. It Is the old one Illustrated by the following example. Abraham thinks of a number, and so does Isaac. Call Abraham's number a and Isaac's i. Is a greater than i? I know which number a refers to: Abraham's; and similarly with t: Isaac's. But that brings me no closer to deciding which is the greater. This can be avoided, however, by requiring that numbers be given in canonical notation, as follows. Let the usual (recursive) definition of the numbers serve to define the set of 'numbers', but not to establish their order.... How does one "require" that? Or meet such a "requirement"? 0 Nothing of Importance will hang on having chosen Godel numbers. If talk of numbers [as if there were such things] in the structuralist context of identifying some sequence to "play the role of" our standard numbers in an analysis of number seems troublesome, let V be some other (countable) set, membership in which is not decidable. The above definition of the X sequence is heavily numerical; but it need not be If the elements of the sequence are not themselves numbers. More generally (and tediously), if <A is some well-ordering of order-type u; (of whatever things), then one can Introduce the sequence of names 'ao', 'a\', '02',..., 'OnV-.as below. The order of the ' a j \ as determined by their subscripts, will then match the order of the elements in A. If the fact that they too are numbers is troubling, then Index the a+ by any well-ordered index set you like. Of course, if there is no way to do that without explicitly or tacitly Invoking numbers, then the view is in some difficulty. In what follows, 'A' does double duty as the name of the sequence and the set of elements that appear in it; S is a sequence of subsets of A; 'B x' designates the result of subtracting the overlap of B and z from B; and >^x(.i..)' denotes the leasts x such that (.x..).
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A (<)

50 = A

00 = HAX(X e So)

51 = So - {ao} 52 = Si- {01} = Sn - {dn}

O! = nAx(x Si) 02 = / M * ( * S2) On-t-1 = HAl(x S n - l )

Of course, if I am unable to compute uncomputable functions, given the above de-

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X can be easily used to yield a decision prvcedure for V as follows (contrary to Church's Theorem): 1b decide whether n is in V, (a) find some m, m > n, such that m G V. An effective procedure for finding such an m exists: Since for each integer k there is a sentence P, with Godel number rp~l, such that rP~l > fc, find such a P for n and form the sentence (P > P) , which is valid and whose Godel number, l~(p _ p ) l , is, a fortiori, also > n. With m [= T(P -* P)l] thus in hand, (b) check (i.e., ask your oracle) whether n <x "i. If the answer is YES, then n belongs to V, if it is NO, it does not. So far, so good. But (1 shall now argue) it was a mistake to think we couldn't tame X into submission and press it into service as the numbers. We can do so either by retaining our accustomed and familiar numerals and reassigning designate to them in the obvious way: '0' will name xo,..., '17' will name i 1 7 ) etc [call that Plan A], or. what would do just as well, by proclaiming the notation 'xo', 'XI', '12',..., 'xn\... as the new, official 'canonical' notation for the elements of X in their orderx (according to which, of course, x< <x x^ iff t < j [call that Plan B\. On either plan, we use the sequence X without piercing the veil of the notation to consult the real essences of its members, which we can henceforth conveniently ignore). In either case, we have a sequence and a notation for its elements that preserves our cherished practices and permits us to carry on as before. Someone who was speculatively inclined, reflecting on our present situation, might even imagine that our familiar canonical notations were similarly the products of divine gerrymandering, designed for the purpose of affording us ready and convenient "access" to their designate.10 Happily, on this scenario, our unary, binary, octo, decimal, Roman, etc. systems (as well as all others recursively intertranslatable with them), like the X notation defined above, reveal the order of the numbers, all while forming a notational veil of innocence that masks their true natures. But waitis everything OK? Is that the end of it? Surely not, for someone who was persuaded by my previous argument and who noticed that our new number sequence leaves us in the following predicament would have reason for concern: An important feature of this pair of sequences,
scriptions, I would be equally unable to "supply you with" any given aj. if pressed to do so; but the sequences are well defined nonetheless and only a fetish for canonical notation would lead one to feel cheated when I responded to the request for an with
'nAx(x 6 SIT)'.

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Perhaps God had meant to create beings with more powerful "computing" powers beings who could make proper use of the numbers In their X orderingbut simply goofed. Panic struck at the thought that the goof might have left humans unable to count, but soon gave way to pastoral calm with the realization that all could be made right again, at least on this count, without having to tinker with either the wetware or ita resident protoplasm. The present note records our Author's reasoning in the matter.

10

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< and <x, is our uncertain grasp of the correlation between them: We have no algorithm for telling, e.g., whether xn < nh; to be sure, we may, by serendipity, know the answer in particular cases, as when n = 17 and k = 2 [under the Godel numbering / have in mind, it is not the case that X17 < 289], but unless we are ("computationally") more powerful than most think we are, we do not have it in us routinely to settle every question of that form. But maybe we should resign ourselves to this level of ignorance (or even, as some would have it [mistakenly, of course], indeterminacy). Ignorance, maybe; but outright error is another matter. Recall our initial example of counting the platypuses using the noncomputable sequence X as our numbers: By counting^ the n-membered set of platypuses in the usual way (using our new numbers "in the same way" as we used the old), we would conclude that it had xn members. However, in general xn / n, having xn members is a far cry from having n members (using V here to refer to n, not to its surrogate, x n ); there might even be no i such that n = x<, as n might have been discarded in the initial reshuffling. The moral is clear: Using our new numbers to count platypuses would get it wrong! And the problems multiply. The obvious lesson is one that we should have anticipated: Reshuffling the designata of our number words without making a corresponding readjustment in their connection to our practices of counting, etc., is perilous business and can lead to grievous error if remedial measures are not taken. Happily, the needed adjustment is near at hand and easy to make: Give up the old definition of lB has n members' as lB can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the cardinal numbers < n' and replace it with one in which '< n' gives way to '<x n' (if, on Plan A, we had stuck with our old notation), or to l<x xn' (if, on Plan B, we had switched to the new). Either definition restores our former abilities. So any old w-sequence would do after all.11

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I once argued (in 'What Numbers Could Not Be' ) that an adequate account of the numbers and our arithmetic practice must satisfy not only the conditions usually recognized to be necessary: (a) identify some w-sequence as the numbers, and (b) correctly characterize the cardinality relation that relates a set to a member of that sequence as its cardinal numberit must also satisfy a third condition: the ' < ' of the sequence must be recursive. This paper argues that adding this further condition was a mistakeany w-sequence would do, no matter how undecidable its '<' relation.
ABSTRACT.
11 The paper was delivered at the LOGICA 1995 Conference held at Llblice Castle, In the Czech Republic, In June 1995; I am grateful to the organizers for the opportunity to present my work in such a pleasant and stimulating setting.