Vicious circle principle

The vicious circle principle is a principle that was endorsed by many predicativist mathematicians in the early 20th century to prevent contradictions. The principle states that no object or property may be introduced by a definition that depends on that object or property itself. In addition to ruling out definitions that are explicitly circular (like "an object has property P iff it is not next to anything that has property P"), this principle rules out definitions that quantify over domains which include the entity being defined. Thus, it blocks Russell's paradox, which defines a set R that contains all sets which do not contain themselves. This definition is blocked because it defines a new set in terms of the totality of all sets, of which this new set would itself be a member. However, it also blocks one standard definition of the natural numbers. First, we define a property as being "hereditary" if, whenever a number n has the property, so does n +1. Then we say that x has the property of being a natural number if and only if it has every hereditary property that 0 has. This definition is blocked, because it defines "natural number" in terms of the totality of all hereditary properties, but "natural number" itself would be such a hereditary property, so the definition is circular in this sense. Most modern mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics think that this particular definition is not circular in any problematic sense, and thus they reject the vicious circle principle. But it was endorsed by many early 20th-century researchers, including Bertrand Russell and Henri Poincaré. On the other hand, Frank P. Ramsey and Rudolf Carnap accepted the ban on explicit circularity, but argued against the ban on circular quantification. After all, the definition "let T be the tallest man in the room" defines T by means of quantification over a domain (men in the room) of which T is a member. But this is not problematic, they suggest, because the definition does not actually create the person, but merely shows how to pick him out of the totality.