Elimination problems in logic

a brief history

William L. Craig

pp. 321-332

in: Essays in honor of William Craig, Synthese 164 (3), 2008.

Abstract

A common aim of elimination problems for languages of logic is to express the entire content of a set of formulas of the language, or a certain part of it, in a way that is more elementary or more informative. We want to bring out that as the languages for logic grew in expressive power and, at the same time, our knowledge of their expressive limitations also grew, elimination problems in logic underwent some change. For languages other than that for monadic second-order logic, there remain important open problems.