How statement and proof provenance work
The first chip identifies the source of the statement or construction; the second identifies the source of its local proof or verification.
- Literature-sourced: the exact statement appears in a cited source; only wording and notation differ.
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- AI-generated: a genuinely novel statement formulated by AI, with no source for the claim itself.
These labels describe origin, not correctness: citations and verification chips remain separate evidence.
ZFC proves there is an inaccessible cardinal
Statement
False assertion: ZFC proves that a strongly inaccessible cardinal exists.
The refutation is conditional: if ZFC is consistent, there is no such proof. This makes no assertion of Con(ZFC).
Facts & Assumptions
Given: ZFC finite-proof metatheory. For a fixed purported proof, reflected its finite axiom list into the least inaccessible rank segment, checked actual cardinalhood of the internal witness, and built a contradiction without a CTM-from-consistency assumption.
An inaccessible rank segment models ZFC: An inaccessible rank segment satisfies each ZFC axiom, and small-cardinal inaccessibility is absolute.
Soundness for arbitrary set signatures: Finite derivations are sound for a set model of their finitely many axiom instances.
Relativization agrees with induced set satisfaction: Fixed-formula relativization agrees with the actual set structure satisfaction.
Refutation
Fix, externally, a purported finite ZFC derivation p of the sentence E asserting that an inaccessible exists. Only finitely many ZFC axiom instances occur as assumptions in p; call their conjunction A_p. Soundness F2 applied to this fixed finite derivation is a theorem of ZF saying that any nonempty set structure satisfying those instances satisfies E. No assertion about a truth predicate for V is involved.
Work now inside ZFC under E. Choose the least inaccessible kappa by ordinal minimization below one witness. F1 proves each of the finitely many instances in A_p relativized to V_kappa; combining these finite proofs and F3 makes its nonempty membership structure a model of A_p. Step 1.1 gives that V_kappa satisfies E. Thus some alpha in V_kappa is internally an inaccessible ordinal. Transitivity gives an actual ordinal alpha<kappa. Its internal cardinalhood is actual cardinalhood: any external bijection between alpha and a smaller ordinal has a graph of rank at most alpha plus finitely many successors, hence belongs to V_kappa, contradicting internal cardinalhood if it existed. F1's inaccessibility absoluteness now applies to this actual cardinal and makes alpha an actual inaccessible, contradicting leastness of kappa.
The preceding construction is a finite ZFC derivation of E implies contradiction, depending on the fixed finite proof p. Append it to p, which derives E, and infer a contradiction in ZFC. Therefore the existence of such p implies inconsistency of ZFC. Contraposition yields exactly the stated conditional nonprovability. This neither extracts a transitive model from Con(ZFC) nor invokes a uniform universe satisfaction relation.
Depends on
Used by
Nothing in the library uses this result yet.
Dependency tree · two levels
12 results within two dependency steps of this one, each drawn at its shortest distance from it. An arrow runs from a result to what uses it, so the chart reads left to right and ends at this result, which carries a heavier outline. Every node is a link to that result. Click elsewhere on the chart to enlarge it.
Sources
- Marks Theorem 18.16 p.79; Loewe Lent 2022 Lecture II identifies the alternative least-inaccessible route (standard reference, not scraped)