Reasoning on a tight budget: Lesniewski's nominalistic metalogic (Q700694)

As the author himself remarks, his ``paper aims to smooth the way for a better understanding of Lesniewski's distinctive approach to metalogic'', the most familiar peculiarities of which are the nominalistic view on syntax of a logical system and nontraditional understanding of the role of definitions in it. A section is devoted to outlining Lesniewski's philosophical background and his motivation for developing such an approach. In two other sections Lesniewski's famous terminological explanations and directives are characterised in short. For illustration, classical propositional calculus is presented first in the traditional form and then in Lesniewski's manner. Another example considered is the formulation of propositional calculus in Łukasiewicz notation that comes back to Lesniewski himself. In the final section, the author sums up the positive and the negative features of Lesniewski's way of presenting logic, and calls attention to two challenges concerning reformulation of Lesniewski in a more traditional and user-friendly manner.