Scribd
Upload
28 views2 pages

;;

Uploaded by

Veljko Kosevic
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
28 views2 pages

;;

Uploaded by

Veljko Kosevic
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

association is the heart of the best case that can be made for logicism and that

unless secondorder
logic has some claim to be regarded as logic, logicism must be considered to have
failed
totally. I see the reasons offered in this paper on behalf of this claim as part of
a partial
vindication of the logicist thesis. I don’t believe we yet have an assessment that
is as just as it
could be of the extent to which Frege, Dedekind, and Russell succeeded in showing
logic to be
the ground of mathematical truth. (Boolos : , n. ; d: , n. )
Until I read the present paper, I had not paid much attention to this footnote.
Much
of the interest of this paper, then, lies in what it reveals about George’s
earliest
thinking about logicism, a topic on which he would work throughout his career, but
on which he would work especially intensively in the last decade of his life.
My editing has been fairly minimal. Obvious typos have been corrected; grammar
has been repaired; material in parentheses has often been moved into footnotes;
some references have been added. I have also added some editorial comments, which
appear in square brackets in the text or else as footnotes, marked with
superscripted
letters.b What is reproduced here, though, is pretty much as I found it.
Let me say, finally, that, were George still with us, he would certainly have
wanted to
contribute to this volume. He had great respect for Crispin’s work, even as he
disagreed
with it, often in fundamental ways. He was also fond of Crispin personally, and I
have
dear memories of a visit to St Andrews, in the fall of , when George and I both
gave
papers at the Joint Session of the Mind Association and the British Society for the
Philosophy of Science. I vividly remember running into George, shortly after I’d
arrived, near the home of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club. George was walking
around with Jason Stanley and laughing as Jason raved about just having seen James
Bond (i.e., Sean Connery). I can only imagine how much fun we might all have had
during the Arché conferences on neo-logicism had George been able to attend some.
I can only imagine, too, what we might have learned from his participation.
Much thanks to Sally Sedgwick for permission to publish this paper.
. Reductions of Arithmetic to Logic and Set Theory
I shall begin by discussing something that I do not consider to be a reduction of
arithmetic to logic. It is a reduction to a “tiny” fragment of set theory.¹ The
axioms of
tiny set theory are those of extensionality, adjunction:²
8x8y9z8wðw 2 z ! w 2 x ∨w ¼ yÞ;
a This is of course chapter  of the first edition (Boolos and Jeffrey ). It
has the same title, “Second-
Order Logic,” in the later editions. In the most recent edition, the fifth, it is
chapter .
b Like this one.
¹ Terminology: Set theory is always Zermelo-Frankel set theory; elementary number
theory is Hilbert-
Bernays Z [i.e., PA—ed.], of which the axioms are the recursion axioms for
successor, plus, and times, and
the induction axioms; arithmetic is the set of all truths (under the standard
interpretation) in the language
of elementary number theory.
² Adjunction is not usually taken as an axiom of set theory, but it is a
consequence of the axioms of
pairing and union, which are.

You might also like