Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2014
In the original example of a transfinite hierarchy of degrees of unsolvability, a predicate Ha is associated with each a in the set 0 of ordinal notations. (See Kleene [K1], Spector [S1], and the references there to Davis and Mostowski.) The predicates are defined by means of induction over the partial well-ordering relation ≤0 on the set 0 of notations for the recursive ordinals. The usefulness of this hierarchy of predicates is enhanced by Spector's proof [S1] of the “uniqueness” property: viz. that the degree of Ha depends only on the ordinal |a| for which a is a notation.