The development of modern logic falls into roughly five periods: • The
embryonic period from
Leibniz to 1847, when the notion of a logical calculus was discussed and developed, particularly by Leibniz, but no schools were formed, and isolated periodic attempts were abandoned or went unnoticed. • The
algebraic period from
Boole's Analysis to
Schröder's
Vorlesungen. In this period, there were more practitioners, and a greater continuity of development. • The
logicist period from the
Begriffsschrift of
Frege to the
Principia Mathematica of
Russell and
Whitehead. The aim of the "logicist school" was to incorporate the logic of all mathematical and scientific discourse in a single unified system which, taking as a fundamental principle that all mathematical truths are logical, did not accept any non-logical terminology. The major logicists were
Frege,
Russell, and the early
Wittgenstein. It culminates with the
Principia, an important work which includes a thorough examination and attempted solution of the
antinomies which had been an obstacle to earlier progress. • The
metamathematical period from 1910 to the 1930s, which saw the development of
metalogic, in the
finitist system of
Hilbert, and the non-finitist system of
Löwenheim and
Skolem, the combination of logic and metalogic in the work of
Gödel and
Tarski. Gödel's
incompleteness theorem of 1931 was one of the greatest achievements in the history of logic. Later in the 1930s, Gödel developed the notion of
set-theoretic constructibility. • The
period after World War II, when
mathematical logic branched into four inter-related but separate areas of research:
model theory,
proof theory,
computability theory, and
set theory, and its ideas and methods began to influence
philosophy.
Embryonic period The idea that inference could be represented by a purely mechanical process is found as early as
Raymond Llull, who proposed a (somewhat eccentric) method of drawing conclusions by a system of concentric rings. The work of logicians such as the
Oxford Calculators led to a method of using letters instead of writing out logical calculations (
calculationes) in words, a method used, for instance, in the
Logica magna by
Paul of Venice. Three hundred years after Llull, the English philosopher and logician
Thomas Hobbes suggested that all logic and reasoning could be reduced to the mathematical operations of addition and subtraction. The same idea is found in the work of
Leibniz, who had read both Llull and Hobbes, and who argued that logic can be represented through a combinatorial process or calculus. But, like Llull and Hobbes, he failed to develop a detailed or comprehensive system, and his work on this topic was not published until long after his death. Leibniz says that ordinary languages are subject to "countless ambiguities" and are unsuited for a calculus, whose task is to expose mistakes in inference arising from the forms and structures of words; hence, he proposed to identify an
alphabet of human thought comprising fundamental concepts which could be composed to express complex ideas, and create a
calculus ratiocinator that would make all arguments "as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate."
Gergonne (1816) said that reasoning does not have to be about objects about which one has perfectly clear ideas, because algebraic operations can be carried out without having any idea of the meaning of the symbols involved.
Bolzano anticipated a fundamental idea of modern proof theory when he defined logical consequence or "deducibility" in terms of variables:Hence I say that propositions M, N, O,... are
deducible from propositions A, B, C, D,... with respect to variable parts i, j,..., if every class of ideas whose substitution for i, j,... makes all of A, B, C, D,... true, also makes all of M, N, O,... true. Occasionally, since it is customary, I shall say that propositions M, N, O,...
follow, or can be
inferred or
derived, from A, B, C, D,.... Propositions A, B, C, D,... I shall call the
premises, M, N, O,... the
conclusions.This is now known as
semantic validity.
Algebraic period Modern logic begins with what is known as the "algebraic school", originating with Boole and including
Peirce,
Jevons,
Schröder, and
Venn. Their objective was to develop a calculus to formalise reasoning in the area of classes, propositions, and probabilities. The school begins with Boole's seminal work
Mathematical Analysis of Logic which appeared in 1847, although
De Morgan (1847) is its immediate precursor. The fundamental idea of Boole's system is that algebraic formulae can be used to express logical relations. This idea occurred to Boole in his teenage years, working as an usher in a private school in
Lincoln, Lincolnshire. For example, let x and y stand for classes, let the symbol
= signify that the classes have the same members, xy stand for the class containing all and only the members of x and y and so on. Boole calls these
elective symbols, i.e. symbols which select certain objects for consideration. An expression in which elective symbols are used is called an
elective function, and an equation of which the members are elective functions, is an
elective equation. The theory of elective functions and their "development" is essentially the modern idea of
truth-functions and their expression in
disjunctive normal form. These are easily distinguished in modern predicate logic, where it is also possible to show that the first follows from the second, but it is a significant disadvantage that there is no way of representing this in the Boolean system. In his
Symbolic Logic (1881),
John Venn used diagrams of overlapping areas to express Boolean relations between classes or truth-conditions of propositions. In 1869 Jevons realised that Boole's methods could be mechanised, and constructed a "logical machine" which he showed to the
Royal Society the following year. This was usefully exploited by Schröder when he set out theorems in parallel columns in his
Vorlesungen (1890–1905). Peirce (1880) showed how all the Boolean elective functions could be expressed by the use of a single primitive binary operation, "
neither ... nor ..." and equally well "
not both ... and ...", however, like many of Peirce's innovations, this remained unknown or unnoticed until
Sheffer rediscovered it in 1913. Boole's early work also lacks the idea of the
logical sum which originates in Peirce (1867),
Schröder (1877) and Jevons (1890), and the concept of
inclusion, first suggested by Gergonne (1816) and clearly articulated by Peirce (1870). The success of Boole's algebraic system suggested that all logic must be capable of algebraic representation, and there were attempts to express a logic of relations in such form, of which the most ambitious was Schröder's monumental
Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik ("Lectures on the Algebra of Logic", vol iii 1895), although the original idea was again anticipated by Peirce. Boole's unwavering acceptance of Aristotle's logic is emphasized by the historian of logic
John Corcoran in an accessible introduction to
Laws of Thought. Corcoran also wrote a point-by-point comparison of
Prior Analytics and
Laws of Thought. According to Corcoran, Boole fully accepted and endorsed Aristotle's logic. Boole's goals were "to go under, over, and beyond" Aristotle's logic by 1) providing it with mathematical foundations involving equations, 2) extending the class of problems it could treat—from assessing validity to solving equations—and 3) expanding the range of applications it could handle—e.g. from propositions having only two terms to those having arbitrarily many. More specifically, Boole agreed with what
Aristotle said; Boole's 'disagreements', if they might be called that, concern what Aristotle did not say. First, in the realm of foundations, Boole reduced the four propositional forms of Aristotelian logic to formulas in the form of equations—by itself a revolutionary idea. Second, in the realm of logic's problems, Boole's addition of equation solving to logic—another revolutionary idea—involved Boole's doctrine that Aristotle's rules of inference (the "perfect syllogisms") must be supplemented by rules for equation solving. Third, in the realm of applications, Boole's system could handle multi-term propositions and arguments whereas Aristotle could handle only two-termed subject-predicate propositions and arguments. For example, Aristotle's system could not deduce "No quadrangle that is a square is a rectangle that is a rhombus" from "No square that is a quadrangle is a rhombus that is a rectangle" or from "No rhombus that is a rectangle is a square that is a quadrangle".
Logicist period After Boole, the next great advances were made by the German mathematician
Gottlob Frege. Frege's objective was the program of
Logicism, i.e. demonstrating that arithmetic is identical with logic. Frege went much further than any of his predecessors in his rigorous and formal approach to logic, and his calculus or
Begriffsschrift is important. Frege's first work, the
Begriffsschrift ("concept script") is a rigorously axiomatised system of propositional logic, relying on just two connectives (negational and conditional), two rules of inference (
modus ponens and substitution), and six axioms. Frege referred to the "completeness" of this system, but was unable to prove this. The most significant innovation, however, was his explanation of the
quantifier in terms of mathematical functions. Traditional logic regards the sentence "Caesar is a man" as of fundamentally the same form as "all men are mortal." Sentences with a proper name subject were regarded as universal in character, interpretable as "every Caesar is a man". At the outset Frege abandons the traditional "concepts
subject and
predicate", replacing them with
argument and
function respectively, which he believes "will stand the test of time". He goes on to say that it is "easy to see how regarding a content as a function of an argument leads to the formation of concepts. Furthermore, the demonstration of the connection between the meanings of the words
if, and, not, or, there is, some, all, and so forth, deserves attention". Frege argued that the quantifier expression "all men" does not have the same logical or semantic form as "all men", and that the universal proposition "every A is B" is a complex proposition involving two
functions, namely ' – is A' and ' – is B' such that whatever satisfies the first, also satisfies the second. In modern notation, this would be expressed as : \forall \; x \big( A(x) \rightarrow B (x) \big) In English, "for all x, if Ax then Bx". Thus only singular propositions are of subject-predicate form, and they are irreducibly singular, i.e. not reducible to a general proposition. Universal and particular propositions, by contrast, are not of simple subject-predicate form at all. If "all mammals" were the logical subject of the sentence "all mammals are land-dwellers", then to negate the whole sentence we would have to negate the predicate to give "all mammals are
not land-dwellers". But this is not the case. This functional analysis of ordinary-language sentences later had a great impact on philosophy and
linguistics. This means that in Frege's calculus, Boole's "primary" propositions can be represented in a different way from "secondary" propositions. "All inhabitants are either men or women" is 's "Concept Script" : \forall \; x \Big( I(x) \rightarrow \big( M(x) \lor W(x) \big) \Big) whereas "All the inhabitants are men or all the inhabitants are women" is : \forall \; x \big( I(x) \rightarrow M(x) \big) \lor \forall \;x \big( I(x) \rightarrow W(x) \big) As Frege remarked in a critique of Boole's calculus: : "The real difference is that I avoid [the Boolean] division into two parts ... and give a homogeneous presentation of the lot. In Boole the two parts run alongside one another, so that one is like the mirror image of the other, but for that very reason stands in no organic relation to it." As well as providing a unified and comprehensive system of logic, Frege's calculus also resolved the ancient
problem of multiple generality. The ambiguity of "every girl kissed a boy" is difficult to express in traditional logic, but Frege's logic resolves this through the different scope of the quantifiers. Thus :\forall \; x \Big( G(x) \rightarrow \exists \; y \big( B(y) \land K(x,y) \big) \Big) means that to every girl there corresponds some boy (any one will do) who the girl kissed. But :\exists \;x \Big( B(x) \land \forall \;y \big( G(y) \rightarrow K(y, x) \big) \Big) means that there is some particular boy whom every girl kissed. Without this device, the project of logicism would have been doubtful or impossible. Using it, Frege provided a definition of the
ancestral relation, of the
many-to-one relation, and of
mathematical induction. This period overlaps with the work of what is known as the "mathematical school", which included
Dedekind,
Pasch,
Peano,
Hilbert,
Zermelo,
Huntington,
Veblen and
Heyting. Their objective was the axiomatisation of branches of mathematics like geometry, arithmetic, analysis and set theory. Most notable was
Hilbert's Program, which sought to ground all of mathematics to a finite set of axioms, proving its consistency by "finitistic" means and providing a procedure which would decide the truth or falsity of any mathematical statement. The standard
axiomatization of the
natural numbers is named the
Peano axioms eponymously. Peano maintained a clear distinction between mathematical and logical symbols. While unaware of Frege's work, he independently recreated his logical apparatus based on the work of Boole and Schröder. The logicist project received a near-fatal setback with the discovery of a paradox in 1901 by
Bertrand Russell. This proved Frege's
naive set theory led to a contradiction. Frege's theory contained the axiom that for any formal criterion, there is a set of all objects that meet the criterion. Russell showed that a set containing exactly the sets that are not members of themselves would contradict its own definition (if it is not a member of itself, it is a member of itself, and if it is a member of itself, it is not). This contradiction is now known as
Russell's paradox. One important method of resolving this paradox was proposed by
Ernst Zermelo.
Zermelo set theory was the first
axiomatic set theory. It was developed into the now-canonical
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZF). Russell's paradox symbolically is as follows: :\text{Let } R = \{ x \mid x \not \in x \} \text{, then } R \in R \iff R \not \in R The monumental
Principia Mathematica, a three-volume work on the
foundations of mathematics, written by Russell and
Alfred North Whitehead and published 1910–1913 also included an attempt to resolve the paradox, by means of an elaborate
system of types: a set of elements is of a different type than is each of its elements (set is not the element; one element is not the set) and one cannot speak of the "
set of all sets". The
Principia was an attempt to derive all mathematical truths from a well-defined set of
axioms and
inference rules in
symbolic logic.
Metamathematical period The names of
Gödel and
Tarski dominate the 1930s, a crucial period in the development of
metamathematics—the study of mathematics using mathematical methods to produce
metatheories, or mathematical theories about other mathematical theories. Early investigations into metamathematics had been driven by Hilbert's program. Work on metamathematics culminated in the work of Gödel, who in 1929 showed that a given
first-order sentence is
deducible if and only if it is logically valid—i.e. it is true in every
structure for its language. This is known as
Gödel's completeness theorem. A year later, he proved two important theorems, which showed Hibert's program to be unattainable in its original form. The first is that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an
effective procedure such as an
algorithm or computer program is capable of proving all facts about the
natural numbers. For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second is that if such a system is also capable of proving certain basic facts about the natural numbers, then the system cannot prove the consistency of the system itself. These two results are known as
Gödel's incompleteness theorems, or simply ''Gödel's Theorem''. Later in the decade, Gödel developed the concept of
set-theoretic constructibility, as part of his proof that the
axiom of choice and the
continuum hypothesis are consistent with
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. In
proof theory,
Gerhard Gentzen developed
natural deduction and the
sequent calculus. The former attempts to model logical reasoning as it 'naturally' occurs in practice and is most easily applied to
intuitionistic logic, while the latter was devised to clarify the derivation of logical proofs in any formal system. Since Gentzen's work, natural deduction and sequent calculi have been widely applied in the fields of proof theory, mathematical logic and computer science. Gentzen also proved normalization and cut-elimination theorems for intuitionistic and classical logic which could be used to reduce logical proofs to a normal form.
Alfred Tarski, a pupil of
Łukasiewicz, is best known for his definition of truth and
logical consequence, and the semantic concept of
logical satisfaction. In 1933, he published (in Polish)
The concept of truth in formalized languages, in which he proposed his
semantic theory of truth: a sentence such as "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Tarski's theory separated the
metalanguage, which makes the statement about truth, from the object language, which contains the sentence whose truth is being asserted, and gave a correspondence (the
T-schema) between phrases in the object language and elements of an
interpretation. Tarski's approach to the difficult idea of explaining truth has been enduringly influential in logic and philosophy, especially in the development of
model theory. Tarski also produced important work on the methodology of deductive systems, and on fundamental principles such as
completeness,
decidability,
consistency and
definability. According to Anita Feferman, Tarski "changed the face of logic in the twentieth century".
Alonzo Church and
Alan Turing proposed formal models of computability, giving independent negative solutions to Hilbert's
Entscheidungsproblem in 1936 and 1937, respectively. The
Entscheidungsproblem asked for a procedure that, given any formal mathematical statement, would algorithmically determine whether the statement is true. Church and Turing proved there is no such procedure; Turing's paper introduced the
halting problem as a key example of a mathematical problem without an algorithmic solution. Church's system for computation developed into the modern
λ-calculus, while the
Turing machine became a standard model for a general-purpose computing device. It was soon shown that many other proposed models of computation were equivalent in power to those proposed by Church and Turing. These results led to the
Church–Turing thesis that any deterministic
algorithm that can be carried out by a human can be carried out by a Turing machine. Church proved additional undecidability results, showing that both
Peano arithmetic and
first-order logic are
undecidable. Later work by
Emil Post and
Stephen Cole Kleene in the 1940s extended the scope of computability theory and introduced the concept of
degrees of unsolvability. The results of the first few decades of the twentieth century also had an impact upon
analytic philosophy and
philosophical logic, particularly from the 1950s onwards, in subjects such as
modal logic,
temporal logic,
deontic logic, and
relevance logic.
Logic after WWII After World War II,
mathematical logic branched into four inter-related but separate areas of research:
model theory,
proof theory,
computability theory, and
set theory. In set theory, the method of
forcing revolutionized the field by providing a robust method for constructing models and obtaining independence results.
Paul Cohen introduced this method in 1963 to prove the independence of the
continuum hypothesis and the
axiom of choice from
Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory. His technique, which was simplified and extended soon after its introduction, has since been applied to many other problems in all areas of mathematical logic. Computability theory had its roots in the work of Turing, Church, Kleene, and Post in the 1930s and 40s. It developed into a study of abstract computability, which became known as
recursion theory. The
priority method, discovered independently by
Albert Muchnik and
Richard Friedberg in the 1950s, led to major advances in the understanding of the
degrees of unsolvability and related structures. Research into higher-order computability theory demonstrated its connections to set theory. The fields of
constructive analysis and
computable analysis were developed to study the effective content of classical mathematical theorems; these in turn inspired the program of
reverse mathematics. A separate branch of computability theory,
computational complexity theory, was also characterized in logical terms as a result of investigations into
descriptive complexity. Model theory applies the methods of mathematical logic to study models of particular mathematical theories. Alfred Tarski published much pioneering work in the field, which is named after a series of papers he published under the title
Contributions to the theory of models. In the 1960s,
Abraham Robinson used model-theoretic techniques to develop calculus and analysis based on
infinitesimals, a problem that first had been proposed by Leibniz. In proof theory, the relationship between classical mathematics and intuitionistic mathematics was clarified via tools such as the
realizability method invented by
Georg Kreisel and Gödel's
Dialectica interpretation. This work inspired the contemporary area of
proof mining. The
Curry–Howard correspondence emerged as a deep analogy between logic and computation, including a correspondence between systems of natural deduction and
typed lambda calculi used in computer science. As a result, research into this class of formal systems began to address both logical and computational aspects; this area of research came to be known as modern type theory. Advances were also made in
ordinal analysis and the study of independence results in arithmetic such as the
Paris–Harrington theorem. This was also a period, particularly in the 1950s and afterwards, when the ideas of mathematical logic begin to influence philosophical thinking. For example,
tense logic is a formalised system for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time. The philosopher
Arthur Prior played a significant role in its development in the 1960s.
Modal logics extend the scope of formal logic to include the elements of
modality (for example,
possibility and
necessity). The ideas of
Saul Kripke, particularly about
possible worlds, and the formal system now called
Kripke semantics have had a profound impact on
analytic philosophy. His best known and most influential work is
Naming and Necessity (1980).
Deontic logics are closely related to modal logics: they attempt to capture the logical features of
obligation,
permission and related concepts. Although some basic novelties
syncretizing mathematical and philosophical logic were shown by
Bolzano in the early 1800s, it was
Ernst Mally, a pupil of
Alexius Meinong, who was to propose the first formal deontic system in his
Grundgesetze des Sollens, based on the syntax of Whitehead's and Russell's
propositional calculus. Another logical system founded after World War II was
fuzzy logic by Azerbaijani mathematician
Lotfi Asker Zadeh in 1965. ==See also==