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Last Updated: 4 months ago
By:
Drs. Gotfridus Goris Seran, M.Si
Lecturer, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences
Universitas Djuanda Bogor
The global community commemorates World Logic Day every year on January 14. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Council for Philosophy and Human Sciences (ICPHS) designated January 14 (beginning on January 14, 2019) as World Logic Day. This date coincides with two significant milestones associated with philosophers and scientists who played a major role in the development of logic.
The first milestone marks the birth of Alfred Tarski, an American philosopher and scientist of Polish origin, born in Warsaw on January 14, 1901 (and who passed away on October 26, 1983). Tarski devoted his work to mathematics, the philosophy of logic, and language, and published numerous scholarly works that remain authoritative references to this day. His most influential contributions include model theory, the notion of truth, finite definitions, and analytic logic. His renowned work, which established him as one of the greatest logicians of the twentieth century, is found in his opus magnum Introduction to Logic and to the Methodology of Deductive Sciences (1936, 1941).
The second milestone commemorates the death of Kurt Friedrich Gödel, an Austrian philosopher and scientist, who was born on April 28, 1906, and died on January 14, 1978. Gödel, a mathematician, logician, and philosopher, is regarded as one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century scientific and philosophical thought. His most significant contribution is the incompleteness theorem, presented in his opus magnum On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems (1931). Gödel’s contributions are also closely related to proof theory, which clarifies the relationship between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and modal logic.
In commemorating World Logic Day, what can be drawn from the thoughts of Tarski and Gödel? The key point to be emphasized on this occasion is the reaffirmation of the role of logic in developing and advancing scientific knowledge. Another important reminder is the centrality of rationality. Logic is concerned with constructing sound reasoning. Commemorating World Logic Day today therefore means reawakening the ideas of Tarski and Gödel on logic, reexamining ways of thinking, reasoning, and arguing, and ultimately making decisions amid the increasingly intense disruption of information flows in the contemporary world.