Bo102010 comments on Deleting paradoxes with fuzzy logic - Less Wrong
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Comments (70)
O...kay. It looks like you just decided to post the first thing on your head without concern for saying anything useful.
You come up with fractional values for truth, but don't think it's necessary to say what a fractional truth value means, let alone formalize it.
You propose the neato idea to use fractional truth values to deal with statements like "this is tall", and boost it with a way to adjust such truth values as height varies. Somehow you missed that we already have a way to handle such gradations; it's called "units of measurement". We don't need to say, "It's 0.1 true that a football field is long"; we just say, "it's true that a football field is 100 yards long.
Anyway, I thought I'd use this opportunity to say something useful. I was just reading Gary Drescher's Good and Real (discussed here before), where he gives the most far-reaching, bold response to the claim that Goedel's theorem proves limitations to machines, and I'm surprised the argument doesn't show up more often, and that he didn't seem to have anyone to cite as having made it before.
It goes like this: people claim that formal systems are somehow limited in that they can't "see" that Goedel statements of the form "This statement can't be proven within the system" are true. Drescher attacks this at the root and says, that's not a limitation, because the statement's not true.
He explains that you can't actually rule out falsehood of the Goedel statement, as many people immediately do. Because it's falsity still leaves room for the possibility that "This statement has a proof, but it's infinitely long." But then the subtle assumption that "This statement has a proof" implies "This statement is true" becomes much more tenuous. It's far from obvious why you must accept as true a statement whose proof you can never complete.
Take that, Penrose!
I voted up your post for its conclusions, but would request that you make them a bit friendlier in the future...