From Hilbert's program to a logic tool box (Q1028646): Difference between revisions

The aim of this well organized paper is to outline what every computer scientists should know about logic. In order to answer this question the author explains a long series of issues that are an interesting basis to outline a syllabus of logic for computer professionals ``responsible for the creation of life-critical software systems''. The paper concentrates on issues of modeling, interpretability and levels of abstraction, and many aspects of traditional logic courses are undermined (the `narrative' of the history from Frege to Hilbert, the centrality of first order logic, the role of completeness and compactness). The author points out the construction of a `logic tool box', containing modeling tools (basic set construction principles, inductive definition, proof by induction, basic cardinality arguments) and logic tools (propositional logic, second order logic, first order logic as a restriction of the second, semantic notions, etc.). Other themes, such as philosophy of mathematics and computer science (to which I could add history of computer science) are ``something to be left for later'', just as the Kabbala that had to be studied not before the age of forty years. Maybe too late, I sholud say: the computer professional outlined by Makowski, so long virgin, facing the problem of when and where to begin his relationship with philosophy or history of science, probably would always answer: `not now, not here'.