My apologies, I amuse myself too easily...

On Fri, Oct 12, 2007 at 04:00:25PM -0500, Linas Vepstas wrote:
> 
> not grounded on ZFC, mostly
> cause its not constructivist. Non-concrete categories are, well,
> roughly speaking bigger than the biggest infinities, and so ZFC doesn't
> really address that.

One of my early confusions was that some older books use the words
"does not exist" as a synonym for "proper class".  Thus, to prove
that something is a proper class, you prove that it "does not exist".
For example, that it has more elements than any cardinal.  Since 
each cardinal is infinitely more infinite than the last ... and 
there are infinitely more of them at each stage ... 

In fact, what was meant is that the class "does not exist as a set"; 
its bigger than any set could be.  In particular, it cannot be grounded
in ZFC.

See, for example

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_class
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Foundations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann-Bernays-G%C3%B6del_axioms

--linas

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