Church's thesis, continuity, and set theory

Abstract

AbstractUnder the assumption that all “rules” are recursive (ECT) the statement Cont(NN, N) that all functions from NN to N are continuous becomes equivalent to a statement KLS in the language of arithmetic about “effective operations”. Our main result is that KLS is underivable in intuitionistic Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory + ECT. Similar results apply for functions from R to R and from 2N to N. Such results were known for weaker theories, e.g. HA and HAS. We extend not only the theorem but the method, fp-realizability, to intuitionistic ZF.