Luke_A_Somers comments on Variable Question Fallacies - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 March 2008 06:22AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (32)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Patrick_(orthonormal) 05 March 2008 05:51:31PM 3 points [-]

Actually, you can't quite escape the problem of the excluded middle by asserting that "This sentence is false" is not well-formed, or meaningful; because Gรถdel's sentence G is a perfectly well-formed (albeit horrifically complicated) statement about the properties of natural numbers which is undecidable in exactly the same way as Epimenides' paradox.

Mathematicians who prefer to use the law of excluded middle (i.e. most of us, including me) have to affirm that (G or ~G) is indeed a theorem, although neither G nor ~G are theorems! (This doesn't lead to a contradiction within the system, fortunately, because it's also impossible to formally prove that neither G nor ~G are theorems.)

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 19 February 2012 07:27:32PM 0 points [-]

No, it's not the same. Gödel sentences can be resolved by adding axioms. You can't add axioms to resolve 'This sentence is false'.