On First-order Theories Which Can Be Represented by Definitions

Abstract

In the paper we consider the classical logicism program restricted to first-order logic.The main result of this paper is the proof of the theorem, which contains the necessary and sufficient conditions for a mathematical theory to be reducible to logic. Those and only those theories, which don’t impose restrictions on the size of their domains, can be reduced to pure logic. Among such theories we can mention the elementary theory of groups, the theory of combinators (combinatory logic), the elementary theory of topoi and many others. It is interesting to note that the initial formulation of the problem of reduction of mathematics to logic is principally insoluble. As we know all theorems of logic are true in the models with any number of elements. At the same time, many mathematical theories impose restrictions on size of their models. For example, all models of arithmetic have an infinite number of elements. If arithmetic was reducible to logic, it would had finite models, including an one-element model. But this is impossible in view of the axiom $0 \neq x'$.