Kai Wehmeier

This open access book is a superb collection of some fifteen chapters inspired by Schroeder-Heister's groundbreaking work, written by leading experts in the field, plus an extensive autobiography and comments on the various contributions by Schroeder-Heister himself. For several decades, Peter Schroeder-Heister has been a central figure in proof-theoretic semantics, a field of study situated at the interface of logic, theoretical computer science, natural-language semantics, and the philosophy of language. The chapters of which this book is composed discuss the subject from a rich variety of angles, including the history of logic, the proper interpretation of logical validity, natural deduction rules, the notions of harmony and of synonymy, the structure of proofs, the logical status of equality, intentional phenomena, and the proof theory of second-order arithmetic. All chapters relate directly to questions that have driven Schroeder-Heister's own research agenda and to which he has made seminal contributions. The extensive autobiographical chapter not only provides a fascinating overview of Schroeder-Heister's career and the evolution of his academic interests but also constitutes a contribution to the recent history of logic in its own right, painting an intriguing picture of the philosophical, logical, and mathematical institutional landscape in Germany and elsewhere since the early 1970s. The papers collected in this book are illuminatingly put into a unified perspective by Schroeder-Heister's comments at the end of the book. Both graduate students and established researchers in the field will find this book an excellent resource for future work in proof-theoretic semantics and related areas.

In theTractatus, Wittgenstein advocates two major notational innovations in logic. First, identity is to be expressed by identity of the sign only, not by a sign for identity. Secondly, only one logical operator, called “N” by Wittgenstein, should be employed in the construction of compound formulas. We show that, despite claims to the contrary in the literature, both of these proposals can be realized, severally and jointly, in expressively complete systems of first-order logic. Building on early work of Hintikka’s, we identify three ways in which the first notational convention can be implemented, show that two of these are compatible with the text of theTractatus, and argue on systematic and historical grounds, adducing posthumous work of Ramsey’s, for one of these as Wittgenstein’s envisaged method. With respect to the second Tractarian proposal, we discuss how Wittgenstein distinguished between general and non-general propositions and argue that, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, an expressively adequate N-operator notation is implicit in theTractatuswhen taken in its intellectual environment. We finally introduce a variety of sound and complete tableau calculi for first-order logics formulated in a Wittgensteinian notation. The first of these is based on the contemporary notion of logical truth as truth in all structures. The others take into account the Tractarian notion of logical truth as truth in all structures over one fixed universe of objects. Here the appropriate tableau rules depend on whether this universe is infinite or finite in size, and in the latter case on its exact finite cardinality.As it is obviously easy to express how propositions can be constructed by means of this operation and how propositions are not to be constructed by means of it, this must be capable of exact expression.5.503.

In §93 of The Principles of Mathematics, Bertrand Russell observes that “the variable is a very complicated logical entity, by no means easy to analyze correctly”. This assessment is borne out by the fact that even now we have no fully satisfactory understanding of the role of variables in a compositional semantics for first-order logic. In standard Tarskian semantics, variables are treated as meaning-bearing entities; moreover, they serve as the basic building blocks of all meanings, which are constructed out of variable assignments. But this has disquieting consequences, including Fine’s antinomy of the variable and an undue dependence of meanings on language. Here I develop an alternative, Fregean version of predicate logic that uses the traditional quantifier–variable apparatus for the expression of generality, possesses a fully compositional, non-representational semantics, and is not subject to the antinomy of the variable. The advantages of Fregean over Tarskian predicate logic are due to the former’s treating variables not as meaningful lexical items, but as mere marks of punctuation, similar to parentheses. I submit that this is indeed how the variables of predicate logic should be construed.

Given a classical theory T, a Kripke model K for the language L of T is called T-normal or locally PA just in case the classical L-structure attached to each node of K is a classical model of T. Van Dalen, Mulder, Krabbe, and Visser showed that Kripke models of Heyting Arithmetic (HA) over finite frames are locally PA, and that Kripke models of HA over frames ordered like the natural numbers contain infinitely many PA-nodes. We show that Kripke models of the latter sort are in fact PA-normal. This result is extended to a somewhat larger class of frames.

The aim of the present study is (1) to show, on the basis of a number of unpublished documents, how Heinrich Scholz supported his Warsaw colleague Jan Łukasiewicz, the Polish logician, during World War II, and (2) to discuss the efforts he made in order to enable Jan Łukasiewicz and his wife Regina to move from Warsaw to Münster under life-threatening circumstances. In the first section, we explain how Scholz provided financial help to Łukasiewicz, and we also adduce evidence of the risks incurred by German scholars who offered assistance to their Polish colleagues. In the second section, we discuss the dramatic circumstances surrounding the Łukasiewiczes' move to Münster in the summer of 1944.

The main goal of this paper is to present and compare two approaches to formalizing cross-world comparisons like John might have been taller than he is in quantified modal logics. One is the standard method employing degrees and graded positives, according to which the example just given is to be paraphrased as something like The height that John has is such that he might have had a height greater than it, which is amenable to familiar formalization strategies with respect to quantified modal logic. The other approach, based on subjunctive modal logic, mimics the mixed indicative-subjunctive patterns typical of cross-world comparisons in many natural languages by means of explicit mood markers. This latter approach is new and should, for various reasons, appeal to linguists and philosophers. Along the way, I argue that attempts to capture cross-world comparison by means of sentential operators are either inadequate or subject to substantive logical and philosophical objections.

Identity, we're told, is the binary relation that every object bears to itself, and to itself only. But how can a relation be binary if it never relates two objects? This puzzled Russell and led Wittgenstein to declare that identity is not a relation between objects. The now standard view is that Wittgenstein's position is untenable, and that worries regarding the relational status of identity are the result of confusion. I argue that the rejection of identity as a binary relation is perfectly tenable. To this end, I outline and defend a logical framework that is not committed to an objectual identity relation but is nevertheless expressively equivalent to first-order logic with identity. After it has thus been shown that there is no indispensability argument for objectual identity, I argue that we have good reasons for doubting the existence of such a relation, and rebut a number of attempts at discrediting these reasons.

In this paper, I consider two curious subsystems ofFrege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik: Richard Heck's predicative fragment H, consisting of schema V together with predicative second-order comprehension (in a language containing a syntactical abstraction operator), and a theory T in monadic second-order logic, consisting of axiom V and 1 1-comprehension (in a language containing anabstraction function). I provide a consistency proof for the latter theory, thereby refuting a version of a conjecture by Heck. It is shown that both Heck and T prove the existence of infinitely many non-logical objects (T deriving,moreover, the nonexistence of the value-range concept). Some implications concerning the interpretation of Frege's proof of referentiality and the possibility of classifying any of these subsystems as logicist are discussed. Finally, I explore the relation of T toCantor's theorem which is somewhat surprising.

It is well known that Frege's system in the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik is formally inconsistent. Frege's instantiation rule for the second-order universal quantifier makes his system, except for minor differences, full (i.e., with unrestricted comprehension) second-order logic, augmented by an abstraction operator that abides to Frege's basic law V. A few years ago, Richard Heck proved the consistency of the fragment of Frege's theory obtained by restricting the comprehension schema to predicative formulae. He further conjectured that the more encompassing Δ11-comprehension schema would already be inconsistent. In the present paper, we show that this is not the case.

It is a philosophical commonplace that quantification involves, invokes, or presupposes, the relation of identity. There seem to be two major sources for this belief: the conviction that identity is implicated in the phenomenon of bound variable recurrence within the scope of a quantifier; memories of Quine’s insistence that quantification requires absolute identity for the values of variables. With respect to, I show that the only extant argument for a dependence of variable recurrence on identity, due to John Hawthorne, fails. I further show that the function of variable recurrence is not subsumed under that of identity, so that a dependence of the former on the latter, if any, would have to be of a rather indirect nature. With respect to, I argue that the relevant passage in Quine fails to establish a connection between quantification and the identity relation, and indeed wasn’t intended by Quine to do so.

The aim of the present study is (1) to show, on the basis of a number of unpublished documents, how Heinrich Scholz supported his Warsaw colleague Jan ?ukasiewicz, the Polish logician, during World War II, and (2) to discuss the efforts he made in order to enable Jan ?ukasiewicz and his wife Regina to move from Warsaw to Münster under life-threatening circumstances. In the first section, we explain how Scholz provided financial help to ?ukasiewicz, and we also adduce evidence of the risks incurred by German scholars who offered assistance to their Polish colleagues. In the second section, we discuss the dramatic circumstances surrounding the ?ukasiewiczes' move to Münster in the summer of 1944

In the first part of this paper we investigate the intuitionistic version $iI\!\Sigma_1$ of $I\!\Sigma_1$ (in the language of $PRA$ ), using Kleene's recursive realizability techniques. Our treatment closely parallels the usual one for $HA$ and establishes a number of nice properties for $iI\!\Sigma_1$ , e.g. existence of primitive recursive choice functions (this is established by different means also in [D94]). We then sharpen an unpublished theorem of Visser's to the effect that quantifier alternation alone is much less powerful intuitionistically than classically: $iI\!\Sigma_1$ together with induction over arbitrary prenex formulas is $\Pi_2$ -conservative over $iI\!\Pi_2$ . In the second part of the article we study the relation of $iI\!\Sigma_1$ to $iI\!\Pi_1$ (in the usual arithmetical language). The situation here is markedly different from the classical case in that $iI\!\Pi_1$ and $iI\!\Sigma_1$ are mutually incomparable, while $iI\!\Sigma_1$ is significantly stronger than $iI\!\Pi_1$ as far as provably recursive functions are concerned: All primitive recursive functions can be proved total in $iI\!\Sigma_1$ whereas the provably recursive functions of $iI\!\Pi_1$ are all majorized by polynomials over ${\Bbb N}$ . 0 $iI\!\Pi_1$ is unusual also in that it lacks closure under Markov's Rule $\mbox{MR}_{PR}$

We investigate a variant of the variable convention proposed at Tractatus 5.53ff for the purpose of eliminating the identity sign from logical notation. The variant in question is what Hintikka has called the strongly exclusive interpretation of the variables, and turns out to be what Ramsey initially (and erroneously) took to be Wittgenstein's intended method. We provide a tableau calculus for this identity-free logic, together with soundness and completeness proofs, as well as a proof of mutual interpretability with first-order logic with identity.

In Section 10 of Grundgesetze, Volume I, Frege advances a mathematical argument (known as the permutation argument), by means of which he intends to show that an arbitrary value-range may be identified with the True, and any other one with the False, without contradicting any stipulations previously introduced (we shall call this claim the identifiability thesis, following Schroeder-Heister (1987)). As far as we are aware, there is no consensus in the literature as to (i) the proper interpretation of the permutation argument and the identifiability thesis, (ii) the validity of the permutation argument, and (iii) the truth of the identifiability thesis. In this paper, we undertake a detailed technical study of the two main lines of interpretation, and gather some evidence for favoring one interpretation over the other.