Abstract
Tarski and Mautner proposed to characterize the “logical” operations on a given domain as those invariant under arbitrary permutations. These operations are the ones that can be obtained as combinations of the operations on the following list: identity; substitution of variables; negation; finite or infinite disjunction; and existential quantification with respect to a finite or infinite block of variables. Inasmuch as every operation on this list is intuitively “logical”, this lends support to the Tarski-Mautner proposal.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Boolos, George, 1984, “To Be Is to Be a Value of a Variable (or to Be Some Values of Some Variable),” Journal of Philosophy 81: 430–449.
Boolos, George, 1985, “Nominalistic Platonism,” Philosophical Review 44: 327–344.
Etchemendy, John, 1988, “Tarski on Truth and Logical Consequence,” Journal of Symbolic Logic 53: 91–106.
Etchemendy, John, 1990, The Concept of Logical Consequence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
Henkin, Leon, 1961, “Some Remarks on Infinitely Long Formulas” in Finitistic Methods: Proceedings of the Symposium on Foundations of Mathematics (Warsaw: Pergamon Press), pp. 167–183.
Lindenbaum, A., and Alfred, Tarski, 1935, “Über die Beschränktheit de Ausdrucksmittle deduktiver Theorien,” Ergebnisse eines mathematischen Kolloquiums 7: 15–22. English translation by J. H. Woodger in Tarski (1983, pp. 385–392).
Mautner, F. I., 1946, “An Extension of Klein's Erlanger Program: Logic as Invariant-Theory,” American Journal of Mathematics 68: 345–384.
Quine, W. V. O., 1986, Philosophy of Logic, 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
Reinhardt, William, 1974, “Remarks on Reflection Principles, Large Cardinals, and Elementary Embeddings,” in Thomas, Jech, ed., Axiomatic Set Theory, Proceedings of the Symposia on Pure Mathematics, vol. 13, part 2 (Providence, R. I.: American Mathematical Society), pp. 189–205.
Resnik, Michael, 1988, “Second-Order Logic Still Wild,” Journal of Philosophy 85: 75–87.
Scott, Dana, 1965, “Logic with Denumerably Long Formulas and Finite Strings of Quantifiers” in John, Addison, Leon, Henkin, and Alfred, Tarski, eds., The Theory of Models (Amsterdam: North-Holland), pp. 329–341.
Sher, Gila, 1991, The Bounds of Logic. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tarski, Alfred, 1936, “Über den Begriff der logischen Folgerung,” Actes du Congrés International de Philosophie Scientifique 7: 1–11. English translation by J. H. Woodger in Tarski (1982, pp. 409–420).
Tarski, Alfred, 1982, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, 2nd edn., translated by J. H. Woodger and edited by John Corcoran. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Tarski, Alfred, 1986, “What are Logical Notions,” History and Philosophy of Logic 7: 143–154. This is the posthumously published text of a 1966 lecture, edited by John Corcoran.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
Thanks to Shaughan Levine, Gila Sher, and the referee for their help.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
McGee, V. Logical operations. J Philos Logic 25, 567–580 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00265253
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00265253