To philosophers, Tarski’s work on truth is considered one of the triumphs of 20th century philosophy.
Yet to Wikipedia, Tarski is a mathematician. Period. Philosophy is not mentioned.
It is true that mathematical logic can be considered as a joint construction by philosophers and mathematicians. Frege, Russell, and Godel are all listed in Wikipedia as both mathematicians and philosophers. So are a couple of modern contributors to logic—Dana Scott and Per Martin-Lof. But just about everyone else who made major contributions to mathematical logic—Peano, Cantor, Hilbert, Zermelo, Skolem, von Neumann, Gentzen, Church, Turing, Komolgorov, Kleene, Robinson, Curry, Cohen, Lawvere, and Girard are listed as mathematicians, not philosophers. To my knowledge, the only pure philosopher who has made a contribution to logic at the level of these people is Kripke, and I’m not sure that should count (because the bulk of his contribution was done before he got to college and picked philosophy as a major. :)
Quine, incidentally, made a minor contribution to mathematical logic with his idea of ‘stratified’ formulas in his ‘New Foundations’ version of set theory. Unfortunately, Quine’s theory was found to be inconsistent. But a few decades later, a fix was discovered and today some of the most interesting Computer Science work on higher-order logic uses a variant of Quine’s idea to avoid Girard’s paradox.
Yet to Wikipedia, Tarski is a mathematician. Period. Philosophy is not mentioned.
This sort of thing is less a fact about the world and more an artifact of the epistemological bias in English Wikipedia’s wording and application of its verifiability rules. en:wp’s way of thinking started at computer technology—as far as I can tell, the first field in which Wikipedia was the most useful encyclopedia—and went in concentric circles out from there (comp sci, maths, physics, the other sciences); work in the humanities less than a hundred or so years old gets screwed over regularly. This is because the verifiability rules have to more or less compress a degree’s worth of training in sifting through human-generated evidence into a few quickly-comprehensible paragraphs, which are then overly misapplied by teenage science geek rulebots who have an “ugh” reaction to fuzzy subjects.
This is admittedly a bit of an overgeneralisation, but this sort of thing is actually a serious problem with Wikipedia’s coverage of the humanities. (Which I’m currently researching with the assistance of upset academics in the area in order to make a suitable amount of targeted fuss about.)
tl;dr: that’s stronger evidence of how Wikipedia works than of how the world works.
I believe Carnap is also primarily listed as a philosopher in wikipiedia, and he certainly counts as a major contributor to modern logic (although, of course, much of his work relates to mathamatics as well).
Unfortunately, Quine’s theory was found to be inconsistent.
Quine’s set theory NF has not been shown to be inconsistent. Neither has it been proven consistent, even relative to large cardinals. This is actually a famous open problem (by the standards of set theory...)
The set theory of the 1940 first edition of Quine’s Mathematical Logic married NF to the proper classes of NBG set theory, and included an axiom schema of unrestricted comprehension for proper classes. In 1942, J. Barkley Rosser proved that Quine’s set theory was subject to the Burali-Forti paradox. Rosser’s proof does not go through for NF(U). In 1950, Hao Wang showed how to amend Quine’s axioms so as to avoid this problem, and Quine included the resulting axiomatization in the 1951 second and final edition of Mathematical Logic.
So I was wrong—the fix came only one decade later.
Quine, incidentally, made a minor contribution to mathematical logic with his idea of ‘stratified’ formulas in his ‘New Foundations’ version of set theory.
Yet to Wikipedia, Tarski is a mathematician. Period. Philosophy is not mentioned.
It is true that mathematical logic can be considered as a joint construction by philosophers and mathematicians. Frege, Russell, and Godel are all listed in Wikipedia as both mathematicians and philosophers. So are a couple of modern contributors to logic—Dana Scott and Per Martin-Lof. But just about everyone else who made major contributions to mathematical logic—Peano, Cantor, Hilbert, Zermelo, Skolem, von Neumann, Gentzen, Church, Turing, Komolgorov, Kleene, Robinson, Curry, Cohen, Lawvere, and Girard are listed as mathematicians, not philosophers. To my knowledge, the only pure philosopher who has made a contribution to logic at the level of these people is Kripke, and I’m not sure that should count (because the bulk of his contribution was done before he got to college and picked philosophy as a major. :)
Quine, incidentally, made a minor contribution to mathematical logic with his idea of ‘stratified’ formulas in his ‘New Foundations’ version of set theory. Unfortunately, Quine’s theory was found to be inconsistent. But a few decades later, a fix was discovered and today some of the most interesting Computer Science work on higher-order logic uses a variant of Quine’s idea to avoid Girard’s paradox.
This sort of thing is less a fact about the world and more an artifact of the epistemological bias in English Wikipedia’s wording and application of its verifiability rules. en:wp’s way of thinking started at computer technology—as far as I can tell, the first field in which Wikipedia was the most useful encyclopedia—and went in concentric circles out from there (comp sci, maths, physics, the other sciences); work in the humanities less than a hundred or so years old gets screwed over regularly. This is because the verifiability rules have to more or less compress a degree’s worth of training in sifting through human-generated evidence into a few quickly-comprehensible paragraphs, which are then overly misapplied by teenage science geek rulebots who have an “ugh” reaction to fuzzy subjects.
This is admittedly a bit of an overgeneralisation, but this sort of thing is actually a serious problem with Wikipedia’s coverage of the humanities. (Which I’m currently researching with the assistance of upset academics in the area in order to make a suitable amount of targeted fuss about.)
tl;dr: that’s stronger evidence of how Wikipedia works than of how the world works.
Wikipedia is not authoritative (and recognizes this explicitly—hence the need to give citations). Here is a quote from Tarski himself:
That sounds like a good way to describe the LW ideal as well.
I believe Carnap is also primarily listed as a philosopher in wikipiedia, and he certainly counts as a major contributor to modern logic (although, of course, much of his work relates to mathamatics as well).
Quine’s set theory NF has not been shown to be inconsistent. Neither has it been proven consistent, even relative to large cardinals. This is actually a famous open problem (by the standards of set theory...)
However, NFU (New Foundations with Urelements) is consistent relative to ZF.
Quoting Wikipedia
So I was wrong—the fix came only one decade later.
Oh, that’s where the name is familiar from...