Formal Logic: Its Scope and Limits - Tapa dura

A reprint of the McGraw-Hill edition of 1991. This is the first beginning logic text to employ the tree method -- a complete formal system of first-order logic that is remarkably easy to understand and use. Its simplicity allows students to take control of the nuts and bolts of formal logic quickly, and to move on to more complex and abstract problems. The tree method is elaborated in manageable steps over five chapters, in each of which its adequacy is reviewed; soundness and completeness proofs are extended at each step, and the decidability proof is extended at the step from truth functions to the logic of nonoverlapping quantifiers with a single variable, after which undecidability is demonstrated by example. The first three chapters are bilingual, with arguments presented twice, in logical notation and in English. The last three chapters consider the discoveries defining the scope and limits of formal methods that marked logic's coming of age in the 20th century: Godel's completeness and incompleteness theorems for first and second-order logic, and the Church-Turing theorem on the undecidability of first-order logic. Includes problems and solutions to selected problems.

Richard Jeffrey (1926-2002) was Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University.