This article extends a paper of Abraham and Bonnet which generalised the famous Hausdorff characterisation of the class of scattered linear orders. They gave an inductively defined hierarchy that characterised the class of scattered posets which do not have infinite incomparability antichains (i.e. have the FAC). We define a larger inductive hierarchy κℌ* which characterises the closure of the class of all κ-well-founded linear orders under inversions, lexicographic sums and FAC weakenings. This...

Shelah’s pcf theory describes a certain structure which must exist if ${\aleph }_{\omega }$ is strong limit and $2^{{\aleph }_{\omega }}>{\aleph }_{{\omega }_1}$ holds. Jech and Shelah proved the surprising result that this structure exists in ZFC. They first give a forcing extension in which the structure exists then argue that by some absoluteness results it must exist anyway. We reformulate the statement to the existence of a certain partially ordered set, and then we show by a straightforward, elementary (i.e., non-metamathematical) argument that such partially...