Proper classes as merely possible sets

This probably won’t work out, but I’ve been thinking about the Cantor and Russell Paradoxes and proper classes and had this curious idea: Maybe proper classes are non-existent possible sets. Thus, there is actually no collection of all the sets in our world, but there is another possible world which contains a set S whose members are all the sets of our world. When we talk about proper classes, then, we are talking about merely possible sets.

Here is the story about the Russell Paradox. There can be a set R whose members are all the actual world’s non-self-membered sets. (In fact, since by the Axiom of Foundation, none of the actual world’s sets are self-membered, R is a set whose members are all the actual world’s sets.) But R is not itself one of the actual world’s sets, but a set in another possible world.

The story about Cantor’s Paradox that this yields is that there can be a cardinality greater than all the cardinalities in our world, but there actually isn’t. And in world w₂ where such a cardinality exists, it isn’t the largest cardinality, because its powerset is even larger. But there is a third world which has a cardinality larger than any in w₂.

It’s part of the story that there cannot be any collections with non-existent elements. Thus, one cannot form paradoxical cross-world collections, like the collection of all possible sets. The only collections there are on this story are sets. But we can talk of collections that would exist counterfactually.

The challenge to working out the details of this view is to explain why it is that some sets actually exist and others are merely possible. One thought is something like this: The sets that actually exist at w are those that form a minimal model of set theory that contains all the sets that can be specified using the concrete resources in the world. E.g., if the world contains an infinite sequence of coin tosses, it contains the set of the natural numbers corresponding to tosses with heads.

From properties to sets

If we have abundant properties in our ontology, do we need to posit a second kind of entities, the sets?

Properties are kind of like sets. If P is a property, write x∈P if and only if x has P. A whole bunch of the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms then are quite plausible. But not all. The most glaring failure is extensionality. The property of being human and the property of being a member of a globally dominant primate species have the same instances, but are not the same property.

We can get extensionality by a little trick and an axiom. Assume the following Axiom of Choice for Properties:

1. If R is any symmetric and transitive relation, then there is a property P such that (a) if x has P, then x stands in R to itself, and (b) for all x if x stands in R to itself, there exists a unique y such that x stands in R to y and y has P.

Like the ordinary Axiom of Choice, this is a kind of principle of plenitude. Apply (1) to the relation C of coextensionality that holds between two properties if and only if they have the same instances. This generates a property S₁ that is had only by properties and is such that for any property P there exists exactly one property Q such that P and Q are coextensive and Q has S₁. In other words, S₁ selects a unique property coextensive with a given property.

To a first approximation, then, we can think of those entities that have S₁ as sets. Then every set is a property, but not every property is a set. We certainly have extensionality, with the usual restriction to allow for urelements (i.e., extensionality only applies to sets). All the other axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel with urelements minus Separation, Foundation and Choice are pretty plausibly true (they follow from plausible analogues for properties on an abundant view of properties). We get Choice for sets for free from (1).

Unfortunately, we cannot have Separation, however. For the property S₁ is coextensive to some set U by our assumptions. And the members of U will just be the instances of S₁, i.e., all the sets. And so we have a universal set, and of course a universal set plus Separation implies Comprehension, and hence the Russell Paradox.

So matters aren't so easy. The Axiom of Foundation is also not so clear. Might there not be a self-instancing property?

Thus the above simple approach gives us too many sets. But there is a solution to this problem, and this is simply to postulate the following second axiom about properties:

2. There is a property S₂ of properties such that (a) concreteness has S₂, and (b) all the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory with Urelements minus Extensionality are satisfied when we stipulate that (i) a set is anything that has S₂ and (ii) A∈B if and only if A is an instance of B.

This axiom is fairly plausible, I think.

Now suppose that S₁ is as before, and let S₂ be any property satisfying (2). Then let S be the conjunction of S₁ and S₂. It is easy to see that if we take our sets to be those properties that have S, we will have all of Zermelo-Fraenkel with Choice and Urelements (ZFCU). Or at least so it seems to me—I haven't written out formal proofs, and maybe I need some further plausible assumptions about what abundant properties are like.

Of course, we cannot expect S₁ and S₂ to be unique. So there will be multiple candidates for sets. That's fine with me.

The big question is whether (1) and (2) are true. But if the theoretical utility of positing sets is a reason to think sets exist, then theoretical utility plus parsimony plus the reasons to believe in properties are a reason to think (1) and (2) are true.