[TYPES] [tag] Re: Declarative vs imperative

[Philippa Cowderoy]

On 05/03/13 23:28, Mark Janssen wrote:
> [ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list ]
>
>>> To me, that sounds like a total and unconditional rejection.
>> No, what I meant is that the classical logic represents a stage in the
>> development of logic.  It cannot be taken as the final answer.  In fact, we
>> cannot accept that we have a final answer until the entire natural language
>> has been formalized, which might take a very very long time indeed!  (The
>> view I take, following Quine, is that logic is a regimentation of natural
>> language.  We can perfectly well circumscribe various regimens for various
>> purposes.)
> But if we're going to be in the Computer Science department, can we
> get away from the idea of "logic as a regimentation of natural
> language" (which is fine for the Philosophy department) and move to
> the idea of logic as equations of Binary Artihmetic and Boolean
> Algebra?

We must do no such thing! Booleans are not especially fundamental to 
computing, however much they are part of our hardware implementations. 
To talk about how things map onto binary arithmetic and boolean algebra, 
we must talk about the things we are mapping onto them: this means 
accepting that some logics talk about other objects of study.

-- 
flippa at flippac.org