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Eugine_Nier comments on [LINK] Steven Landsburg "Accounting for Numbers" - response to EY's "Logical Pinpointing" - Less Wrong
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Except insofar as the mathematicians, unknown to each other, have different ideas of what constitutes a valid rule of inference.
A logical system is a mathematical obect. If the problem is that different mathematicians might think they're talking about the same object when they're really talking about different ones, then I don't see why logical systems, out of all mathematical objects, should be particularly exempt from this problem.
Also, of course, to put this in the context of the original post, if we're talking about second order logic, then of course there can be no automated proof-checkers.
You appear to be confused here. The rest of your post is good.
I should have said this more carefully. If one allows enough rules of inference so that all the logical consequences of the axioms can be proved, then there are no automated proof checkers. So you can have proof checkers, but only at the cost of restricting the system so that not all logical consequences (i.e. implications that are true in every model) can be proved.
I think there's a definitional issue here. Eugine is using "proof checker" to mean an algorithm that given a sequence of statements in an axiomatic system verifies that the proof is formally valid. You seem to mean by proof checker something like a process that goes through listing all valid statements in the system along with a proof of the statement.
JoshuaZ: No, I mean the former. The problem is that you have enough rules of inference to allow you to extract all logical consequences of your axioms, then that set of rules of inference is going to be too complicated to explain to any computer. (i.e. the rules of inference are non-recursive.)
Isn't that more a consequence of the stronger statement that you just can't write down all valid inferences in the second-order system?