[FOM] Re:Arithmetic-free theory of formal systems? (T. Chow)

[addamo]

On Monday, 17 May 2004 Timothy Y. Chow wrote:


'... whether it's possible to define a formal language,
[...] that directly formalizes the concepts of
"symbol," "concatenation," etc. without reference to arithmetic concepts.'

1.  The problem was considered by Tarski and Quine.
2.  I think that very interesting work in this direction was done recently
by Andrzej Grzegorczyk. Please look a file with the first
draft of his work 'Decidability without mathematics' 
available on: http://www.calculemus.org/
I have a copy of this file.

Adam