A Collection of Papers by Varoius Authors

Abstract: "We investigate asymptotic probabilities of properties expressible in the infinitary logic [formula] on finite structures. Sentences in this logic may have arbitrary disjunctions and conjunctions, but they involve only a finite number of distinct variables. We show that the 0-1 law holds for [formula], i.e., the asymptotic probability of every sentence in this logic exists and is equal to either 0 or 1. This result subsumes earlier work on asymptotic probabilities for various fixpoint logics and reveals the boundary of 0-1 laws for infinitary logics."

This book brings together several directions of work in model theory between the late 1950s and early 1980s.

This volume makes the basic facts about admissible sets accessible to logic students and specialists alike.

George Boolos was one of the most prominent and influential logician-philosophers of recent times. This collection, nearly all chosen by Boolos himself shortly before his death, includes thirty papers on set theory, second-order logic, and plural quantifiers; on Frege, Dedekind, Cantor, and Russell; and on miscellaneous topics in logic and proof theory, including three papers on various aspects of the Gödel theorems. Boolos is universally recognized as the leader in the renewed interest in studies of Frege's work on logic and the philosophy of mathematics. John Burgess has provided introductions to each of the three parts of the volume, and also an afterword on Boolos's technical work in provability logic, which is beyond the scope of this volume.

This book takes an idea first explored by medieval logicians 800 years ago and revisits it armed with the tools of contemporary linguistics, logic, and computer science. The idea - the Holy Grail of the medieval logicians - was the thought that all of logic could be reduced to two very simple rules that are sensitive to logical polarity (for example, the presence and absence of negations). Ludlow and Živanović pursue this idea and show how it has profound consequences for our understanding of the nature of human inferential capacities. They also show its consequences for some of the deepest issues in contemporary linguistics, including the nature of quantification, puzzles about discourse anaphora and pragmatics, and even insights into the source of aboutness in natural language. The key to their enterprise is a formal relation they call "p-scope" - a polarity-sensitive relation that controls the operations that can be carried out in their Dynamic Deductive System. They show that with p-scope in play, deductions can be carried out using sublogical operations like those they call COPY and PRUNE - operations that are simple syntactic operations on sentences. They prove that the resulting deductive system is complete and sound. The result is a beautiful formal tapestry in which p-scope unlocks important properties of natural language, including the property of "restrictedness," which they prove to be equivalent to the semantic notion of conservativity. More than that, they show that restrictedness is also a key to understanding quantification and discourse anaphora, and many other linguistic phenomena.

Focusing on Gentzen-type proof theory, this volume presents a detailed overview of creative works by author Gaisi Takeuti and other twentieth-century logicians. The text explores applications of proof theory to logic as well as other areas of mathematics. Suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of mathematics, this long-out-of-print monograph forms a cornerstone for any library in mathematical logic and related topics. The three-part treatment begins with an exploration of first order systems, including a treatment of predicate calculus involving Gentzen's cut-elimination theorem and the theory of natural numbers in terms of Gödel's incompleteness theorem and Gentzen's consistency proof. The second part, which considers second order and finite order systems, covers simple type theory and infinitary logic. The final chapters address consistency problems with an examination of consistency proofs and their applications.

The aim of this volume is to collect original contributions by the best specialists from the area of proof theory, constructivity, and computation and discuss recent trends and results in these areas. Some emphasis will be put on ordinal analysis, reductive proof theory, explicit mathematics and type-theoretic formalisms, and abstract computations. The volume is dedicated to the 60th birthday of Professor Gerhard Jäger, who has been instrumental in shaping and promoting logic in Switzerland for the last 25 years. It comprises contributions from the symposium “Advances in Proof Theory”, which was held in Bern in December 2013. ​Proof theory came into being in the twenties of the last century, when it was inaugurated by David Hilbert in order to secure the foundations of mathematics. It was substantially influenced by Gödel's famous incompleteness theorems of 1930 and Gentzen's new consistency proof for the axiom system of first order number theory in 1936. Today, proof theory is a well-established branch of mathematical and philosophical logic and one of the pillars of the foundations of mathematics. Proof theory explores constructive and computational aspects of mathematical reasoning; it is particularly suitable for dealing with various questions in computer science.

History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The fourteen essays in this volume build on the pioneering effort of Garrett Birkhoff, professor of mathematics at Harvard University, who in 1974 organized a conference of mathematicians and historians of modern mathematics to examine how the two disciplines approach the history of mathematics. In History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics, William Aspray and Philip Kitcher bring together distinguished scholars from mathematics, history, and philosophy to assess the current state of the field. Their essays, which grow out of a 1985 conference at the University of Minnesota, develop the basic premise that mathematical thought needs to be studied from an interdisciplinary perspective. The opening essays study issues arising within logic and the foundations of mathematics, a traditional area of interest to historians and philosophers. The second section examines issues in the history of mathematics within the framework of established historical periods and questions. Next come case studies that illustrate the power of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of mathematics. The collection closes with a look at mathematics from a sociohistorical perspective, including the way institutions affect what constitutes mathematical knowledge.