Synthetic Philosophy and Deductive Engineering
This document is at present just a placeholder for a more complete account of the philosophical rationale for the thesis that all declarative knowledge can be represented in a single universal logical framework.
I will start it off by indicating the kinds of things which are needed to present a convincing argument for a thesis of universality for some families of logical system.
The thesis of universality under consideration is one about the expressiveness of declarative languages. The notion of expressiveness here is semantic, it is above what meanings can be expressed in a given language. The SPaDE project is concerned with proof, but the thesis of universality is not about what can be proved in some formal system, it is about what can be expressed in some declarative language.
For the thesis to have definite meaning we need to have a clear idea of what is meant by:
-declarative language