Title: Substitution in Fraenkel-Mostowski sets

Abstract:

Fraenkel-Mostowski (FM) sets was introduced in the first half of the last century to prove the independence of AC from the other axioms of ZF set theory with atoms (urelemente). Gabbay (that's me) and Pitts applied the theory in a new way to give a set-theoretic model of alpha-equivalence, which they used to design the FreshML programming language and the Gabbay-Pitts NEW quantifier. Details and papers are on my homepage.

In this talk I will show that FM sets is actually a model of capture-avoiding substitution as well. That is, there is a function-class which substitutes atoms a,b,c for sets in a capture-avoiding way. Unlike the naive action given by
a[a->x]=x
b[a->x]=b
Z[a->x]={z[a->x] | z:Z}
our action is intelligent enough to detect when an atom is mentioned "free" in a set and act accordingly. For example if we write Atoms for the set of atoms then
Atoms[a->x] = Atoms
according to our action, and
(Atoms - {a})[a->0] = Atoms - {0}

This work is similar in flavour to Aczel's universes with parameters, but FM sets is a set theory with no obvious bells and whistles, like Aczel's systems. It is therefore possible to import technology from syntax to set theory, and talk about "unification of sets", and from semantics to build models directly in set theory where variables are represented by atoms, and substitution is represented by substitution.