The predicative Frege hierarchy

In this paper, we characterize the strength of the predicative Frege hierarchy, , introduced by John Burgess in his book [J. Burgess, Fixing frege, in: Princeton Monographs in Philosophy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005]. We show that and are mutually interpretable. It follows that is mutually interpretable with Q. This fact was proved earlier by Mihai Ganea in [M. Ganea, Burgess’ PV is Robinson’s Q, The Journal of Symbolic Logic 72 (2) (2007) 619–624] using a different proof. Another consequence of the our main result is that is mutually interpretable with Kalmar Arithmetic (a.k.a. EA, EFA, , Q3). The fact that interprets EA was proved earlier by Burgess. We provide a different proof.Each of the theories is finitely axiomatizable. Our main result implies that the whole hierarchy taken together, , is not finitely axiomatizable. What is more: no theory that is mutually locally interpretable with is finitely axiomatizable.