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Rehabilitating George Cantor

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DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.21361.92002

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 Rehabilitating George Cantor
Edouard G. Belaga
August 28, 2020

Abstract
Georg Cantor was the genuine discoverer of the Mathematical In-
finity, and whatever he claimed, suggested, or even surmised should
be taken seriously – albeit, with time, not necessary at its face value.
Because alongside his exquisite in beauty ordinal construction and his
fundamental powerset description of the continuum, Cantor has also
left to us his obsessive presumption that the universally overpresent
universe of (transfinite) sets should be subjected to laws transfinitely
similar to those governing the set of natural numbers. During the last
hundred years, the mainstream set- and proof-theoretical research – all
insights and adjustments due to Kurt Gödel’s, Gerhard Gentzen’s, and
Paul Cohen’s revolutionary discoveries notwithstanding – were compli-
antly centered on ad hoc axiomatizations of Cantor’s Vorstellungskraft
of this universal transfinite design. We believe, however, that the on-
tological and epistemic sustainability of this design was from the very
beginning irremediably compromised by the underlying peremptory
Reductionist mindset of the old Laplacian ideology of science.
The ontological set-theoretical error is the presumption that Math-
ematics is ontologically pristinely free, and that the newly invented,
most primitive mathematical appellation set is the most universal
mathematical notion ready for all imaginable axiomatizations. Epis-
temic mistake is the naïve assumption that the fundamentally unpre-
dictable and never completing processes of the creation of, and the
search for, countable ordinals could be finally interpreted as a set, too.
This does not mean that D. A. Martin’s and W. Hugh Woodin’s set
theory is formally mistaken. Still, it is not Mathematics but a mathe-
matical science fiction: mathematical languages, proofs and decision-
makings are developed so far and are so rich, that along the authentic
research of Mathematical Reality there exist today some amazing, lit-
erate and laboriously created “mathematical science-fiction novels”.
Key words. Georg Cantor, transfinite numbers, countable and uncount-
able ordinals and cardinals

1
Contents
1 Georg Cantor, 1835-1918 3

2 Cantor’s double ontological base 4

2.1 Infinite cardinality ontologically discovered . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2 Infinite ordinality ontologically constructed . . . . . . . . . . . 5

3 Transfinite ontology of ordinals and cardinals 7

3.1 Transfinite ontological evidence for ordinals . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.2 Transfinite ontological evidence for cardinals ? . . . . . . . . . 8
3.3 Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

4 Ordinal escape from epistemic platitudes 11

4.1 Georg Cantor’s Laplacian inaccuracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4.2 The hardening epistemic trap for cardinals . . . . . . . . . . . 12

5 Two ontological stems of cardinality 13

5.1 Philosophical mistakes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.2 Some public disbelief concerning set-theory . . . . . . . . . . . 15

6 Countable obstacles to the existence of !1 16

6.1 Uncountable ordinals do not exist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
6.2 No Cantor transfinite counting up to the continuum . . . . . . 18

7 Acknowlegement 19

2
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Dr. Edouard G. BELAGA

Institut de Recherche Mathématique Avancée de Strasbourg
7 rue René Descartes, F-67084 Strasbourg Cedex, FRANCE
e-mail: dr.edouard.belaga@gmail.com

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