Truth Through Proof, 0: Preamble

I am eventually going to be writing a (short) review for  Mind of Alan Weir's new book  Truth Through Proof: A Formalist Foundation for Mathematics (OUP, 2010). To help fix my ideas,  I'll be writing a (much longer) series of discussion notes here on my blog, as I sporadically work through the book. Given other commitments, however, I'll have to take things pretty slowly over the coming weeks.

As with similar series of postings on other books here, I expect that these notes will weave around and about Weir's book (henceforth  TTP) in a more free-ranging way than would be appropriate in a review: but I'll try to make it clear when I'm summarizing TTP, when I'm directly commenting on Weir's views, and when I am striking out more on my own account. All comments from other readers of the book as we go along will be very gratefully received!

After the Introduction, Weir's chapters are divided into sections numbered off with roman numerals: so here '3.III' means Chapter 3, §III. Double quotation marks are reserved to signal quotations from TTP (and otherwise unattributed page numbers of course refer to the book too).

So with no more preamble, let's dive in … tomorrow!