Abstract

Aczel's theory of hypersets provides an interesting alternative to the standard view of sets as inductively constructed, well-founded objects, thus providing a convienent formalism in which to consider non-well-founded versions of classically well-founded constructions, such as the "circular logic" of [3]. This theory and ZFC are mutually interpretable; in particular, any model of ZFC has a canonical "extension" to a non-well-founded universe. The construction of this model does not immediately generalize to weaker set theories such as the theory of admissible sets. In this paper, we formulate a version of Aczel's antifoundation axiom suitable for the theory of admissible sets. We investigate the properties of models of the axiom system KPU$^-$, that is, KPU with foundation replaced by an appropriate strengthening of the extensionality axiom. Finally, we forge connections between "non-wellfounded sets over the admissible set A" and the fragment L$_A$ of the modal language L$_\infty$.