🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov20.201258.17652@husc3.harvard.edu>, zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:


> 
> Great.  Instead of promulgating my doctrinaire image, perhaps I can
> ask you to elucidate your [censored] comments.  In what sense, and by
> what kind of argument has the Whitehead and Russell (note the correct
> order) claim that mathematics is reducible to logic been proved false?
> What is its relation to the formalist program, and what is the
> connection between the latter and Montague's proposal?

As far as I know, the paradoxes in set theory and Goedel's work are generally
accepted as showing that mathematics cannot be derived from logic and
set theory - thus killing Hilbert's formalist programme. It would appear
that *formal* logic and set theory are actually simply just bits of
mathematics with no special status. (I write this as a complete amateur).
Why do you think that what won't work for math will work for natural language
(which you believe to be just another formal language)?


Philip Swann