In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein maintained that arithmetic consists of equations arrived at by the practice of calculating outcomes of operations $\Omega ^{n}(\bar {\xi })$ defined with the help of numeral exponents. Since $Num$ (x) and quantification over numbers seem ill-formed, Ramsey wrote that the approach is faced with “insuperable difficulties.” This paper takes Wittgenstein to have assumed that his audience would have an understanding of the implicit general rules governing his operations. By employing the Tractarian logicist interpretation that the N-operator $N(\bar {\xi })$ and recursively defined arithmetic operators $\Omega ^{n}(\bar {\xi })$ are not different in kind, we can address Ramsey’s problem. Moreover, we can take important steps toward better understanding how Wittgenstein might have imagined emulating proof by mathematical induction.

We consider the standard slotted ALOHA system with a finite number of buffered users. Stability analysis of such a system was initiated by Tsybakov and Mikhailov (1979). Since then several bounds on the stability region have been established; however, the exact stability region is known only for the symmetric system and two-user ALOHA. This paper proves necessary and sufficient conditions for stability of the ALOHA system. We accomplish this by means of a novel technique based on three simple observations: applying mathematical induction to a smaller copy of the system, isolating a single queue for which Loynes' stability criteria is adopted, and finally using stochastic dominance to verify the required stationarity assumptions in the Loynes criterion. We also point out that our technique can be used to assess stability regions for other multidimensional systems. We illustrate it by deriving stability regions for buffered systems with conflict resolution algorithms (see also Georgiadis and Szpankowski (1992) for similar approach applied to stability of token-passing rings).