Russell, Zermelo, and Dummett

Abstract

Concerns about generality in the context of set theory are not new. Russell seeks to resolve the set-theoretic antinomies by maintaining that we cannot legitimately speak of ‘all classes’. Zermelo attempts to avoid the paradoxes without ‘constriction and mutilation’ by adopting an open-ended conception of the cumulative hierarchy of sets. Dummett takes the indefinite extensibility of concepts such as set and ordinal to impugn absolutism about quantifiers. But not every paradox-inspired argument is an argument for relativism about quantifiers. This chapter aims to fill in the logical and philosophical background to the contemporary absolute generality debate, with an eye to disentangling my favoured indefinite-extensibility-based argument from others in its vicinity.