srn347 comments on Second-Order Logic: The Controversy - LessWrong
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Second order logic may be able to express all expressible statements in 3rd order logic, 4th order, up to any finite Nth order, but perhaps there exist ∞th order statements that 2nd order logic cannot express. Albeit, such statements could never be fully decidable and would thus be, at best, semidecidable or co-semidecidable. This may not be complete, but science works the same way.
Nope, 2nd-order logic can discuss Nth order where N is an infinite ordinal, as well [for some class of describable ordinals]. Maybe the argument could be made that 2nd-order logic cannot discuss a universe containing all the ordinals, and in that case maybe we could argue that set theory can, and is therefore more powerful. But this is not clear.
Independently of that, we might also believe that category theory can describe things beyond set theory, because category theory regularly investigates categories which correspond to "large" sets (such as the set of all sets). There are ways to put category theory into set theory, but these translate the "large" sets into "small" sets such as Grothendeik universes, so we could still argue that the semantics of category theory is bigger.
However, even if this is the case, it might be that 2nd-order logic can encode category theory in the same way that it can encode 3rd-order logic. We can add axioms to 2nd-order logic which describe non-standard set theories containing "big" sets, such as NF. This may allow for an "honest" account of category theory, in which categories really can be defined on "big" sets such as the set of all sets.
I don't think that infinitary logic is the same as ω-order logic.
Wouldn't ω-order logic be a subset of infinitary logic? Or do I have it backwards?
I don't think they have anything to do with each other. Infinitary logic is first-order logic with infinite proof lengths. Second-order logic is finite proof lengths with quantification over predicates. I don't know if there's any particular known relation between what these two theories can express.