benkuhn comments on Walkthrough of "Definability of Truth in Probabilistic Logic" - Less Wrong

11 Post author: So8res 09 December 2013 03:44AM

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Comment author: benkuhn 09 December 2013 09:43:14PM 2 points [-]

I think your proof secretly turns ¬¬p into p in the first step, which isn't legit. However, your modification does give equality on logically equivalent sentences, in the following way:

Suppose p <=> ~q. Then P(p) = P(p && q) + P(~q && p) = P(~q && p) by 3 P(~q) = P(~q && p) + P(~p && ~q) = P(~q && p) by 3

Hence if p is equivalent to q and at least one starts with a ~ sign, then P is equal on them. Now suppose p <=> q with neither one starting with a ~ sign: we have

P(p) = P(~~p) = P(~~q) = P(q)

and we're done.

Comment author: Manfred 09 December 2013 10:33:16PM *  0 points [-]

I think your proof secretly turns ¬¬p into p in the first step, which isn't legit.

It does, drat.

P(p) = P(~~p)

Ok. So to fix/complete my proof we need P(¬¬p && q && p) = P(p && q && p). Hm. Ok. So to prove they're equal we just add on another term using axiom 1 and then rule out the contradiction in such away that we show they're both equal to the same thing.

Comment author: benkuhn 10 December 2013 12:23:13AM 0 points [-]

Or, once you have equality for logically equivalent sentences, note that (p && q) <=> (q && p) and hence we have directly that P of the two sides are equal.