Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is asocial art.

Computability and Logic has become a classic because of its accessibility to students without a mathematical background and because it covers not simply the staple topics of an intermediate logic course, such as Godel's incompleteness theorems, but also a large number of optional topics, from Turing's theory of computability to Ramsey's theorem. This 2007 fifth edition has been thoroughly revised by John Burgess. Including a selection of exercises, adjusted for this edition, at the end of each chapter, it offers a (...) simpler treatment of the representability of recursive functions, a traditional stumbling block for students on the way to the Godel incompleteness theorems. This updated edition is also accompanied by a website as well as an instructor's manual. (shrink)

In Minimal Rationality, Christopher Cherniak boldly challenges the myth of Man the the Rational Animal and the central role that the "perfectly rational...

A model of idealized scientific inquiry is presented in which scientists are required to infer the nature of the structure that makes true the data they examine. A necessary and sufficient condition is presented for scientific success within this paradigm.

Alternative models of idealized scientific inquiry are investigated and compared. Particular attention is devoted to paradigms in which a scientist is required to determine the truth of a given sentence in the structure giving rise to his data.