Gödel, Tarski and the Lure of Natural Language

Juliette Kennedy is Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on set theory, history of logic and philosophy of mathematics, and she is Editor of Interpreting Gödel: Critical Essays (Cambridge, 2014).

• 1. Introduction; 1.1 The Syntax/Semantics Distinction; 1.2 Our Logical Pluralism; 1.3 Formal vs Linguistic Semantics; 2. Formalism Freeness and Entanglement: Definitions; 2.1 Precedents; 2.2 Entanglement and Formalism Freeness: Varieties; 2.3 A Simple Preference for Semantic Methods?; 3. Computability: the Primary Example; 3.1 On Adequacy; 3.2 Different Notions of Computability Emerge in the 1930s; 3.3 The 'Scope Problem'; 3.4 Turing's Analysis of Computability; 3.5 Gödel's Reaction to Turing's Work at the Time; 3.6 Coda: a Word About Deviant Encodings; 4. Gödel and Formalism Independence; 4.1 Gödel on Formalism; 4.2 Episodes of Formalism Independence in Gödel's Writings; 4.3 Gödel's Princeton Bicentennial Lecture; 4.4 Implementation; 4.5 Logical Autonomy?; 5. Tarski and 'the Mathematical'; 5.1 'The Mathematical', Definable Sets of Reals, and Naïve Set Theory; 5.2 Tarski's Naturalism; 5.3 Squeezing First Order Definability; 5.4 Tarski and Logicality; 5.5 In Sum: Parataxis; 5.6 Coda: an Improvement of McGee's Theorem; 6. Model Theoretic Aspects; 6.1 Abstract Elementary Classes; 6.2 Patchwork Foundations, On-Again-Off-Again-Sim and Implicit Syntax; 6.3 Implicit Syntax, Implicit Logic; 6.4 A Remark on Set Theory; 6.5 Symbiosis; 6.6 Coda: Symbiosis in Detail; 7. On the Side of Natural Language.

'Kennedy creatively embeds Gödel's ideal of 'formalism freeness' into myriad results in contemporary logic and foundations of mathematics, offering novel historical reconstructions of Tarski and Turing. A cutting-edge work of philosophy that synthesizes, while going beyond, our current ideas about foundations.' Juliet Floyd, Boston University