The 1-consistency of arithmetic is shown to be equivalent to the existence of fixed points of a certain type of update procedure, which is implicit in the epsilon-substitution method.

Let KP- be the theory resulting from Kripke-Platek set theory by restricting Foundation to Set Foundation. Let G: V → V (V:= universe of sets) be a ▵0-definable set function, i.e. there is a ▵0-formula φ(x, y) such that φ(x, G(x)) is true for all sets x, and $V \models \forall x \exists!y\varphi (x, y)$ . In this paper we shall verify (by elementary proof-theoretic methods) that the collection of set functions primitive recursive in G coincides with the collection of (...) those functions which are Σ1-definable in KP- + Σ1-Foundation + ∀ x ∃!yφ (x, y). Moreover, we show that this is still true if one adds Π1-Foundation or a weak version of ▵0-Dependent Choices to the latter theory. (shrink)

An approach to ordinal analysis is presented which is finitary, but highlights the semantic content of the theories under consideration, rather than the syntactic structure of their proofs. In this paper the methods are applied to the analysis of theories extending Peano arithmetic with transfinite induction and transfinite arithmetic hierarchies.

A notion called Herbrand saturation is shown to provide the model-theoretic analogue of a proof-theoretic method, Herbrand analysis, yielding uniform model-theoretic proofs of a number of important conservation theorems. A constructive, algebraic variation of the method is described, providing yet a third approach, which is finitary but retains the semantic flavor of the model-theoretic version.

We use model-theoretic methods described in [3] to obtain ordinal analyses of a number of theories of first- and second-order arithmetic, whose proof-theoretic ordinals are less than or equal to Γ0.