Discussion:
[Coq-Club] [isabelle, Coq-Club, MetaMath] The Zande's Challenge
José Manuel Rodriguez Caballero
2018-08-08 09:21:14 UTC
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This post is just an intellectual challenge for people with a lot of free
time this summer...

The Azande are an ethnic group of North Central Africa. Here, a documentary
about these people:


Anthropologists don't agree about which logical system could be the best
one to express Zande's religion postulates in a consistent way. These
postulates seem to be contradictory from the point of view of traditional
mathematics.

I think that it will be interesting to think about this problem from the
perspective of a proof assistant, trying to mechanize these religions
postulates in a consistent way. Maybe someone reading this post will solve
this anthropologic mystery and to publish a paper with the solution
(anthropologists will be interested in this new information). Here is a
reference to this problem from a rather mathematical point of view:

Salmon, Merrilee H. "Do Azande and Nuer use a non-standard logic?."
*Man* (1978):
444-454. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2801940?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents


Kind Regards,
Jose M.

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