🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov5.182513.25397@lclark.edu> higa@lclark.edu (Keith Higa) writes:
>My logic professor brought up the story of Bertrand Russell.  I think
>(correct me if I'm wrong), that he and a co-author set out to prove that
>all math was based on logic, and it took them two volumes to logically
>prove that 1+1=2.
>

The other author is Whitehead.  The work is "Principia Mathematica".  Russell
and Whitehead argue against the position, advanced by Immanuel Kant, that
mathematical truths are neither empirical (to be established by observation)
nor "analytic" (to be established by reasoning about the meanings of words).
They do this by showing that mathematical truths are analytic after all.
They manage to develop a good deal of the basics of mathematical logic
along the way.

It does take a lot of work to get to a position where a statement that is
clearly mathematical is clearly analytic too.  But that doesn't seem to 
have any bearing on whether it is worthwhile to learn elementary logic
in high school.

-Ross

PS  Who drew the cartoon with a customer saying to a waiter "Yes,
the addition seems correct, but I am concerned that the axioms of arithmetic
may be inconsistent thus rendering the computation invalid?"