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bryjnar comments on Gap in understanding of Logical Pinpointing - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Incorrect 12 November 2012 05:33PM

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Comment author: Giles 13 November 2012 08:38:40PM 0 points [-]

but I'm pretty sure it's not true of the logic we use day-to-day.

I'm curious - can you give an example?

Are you thinking of e.g. the set {"there are a finite number of spoons and at least n spoons" for all n}? For any finite subset of those sentences you can imagine a possible world that satisfies them, but there isn't a possible world that satisfies them all.

Comment author: bryjnar 13 November 2012 10:57:21PM 1 point [-]

That would do. Also: {"Jim has non-zero height and Jim is less than 1/n metres tall"}. It generally screws up talk about numbers in this way.

Comment author: Giles 13 November 2012 11:19:04PM 0 points [-]

Right. In order to satisfy all of those statements about Jim simultaneously, you need a nonstandard model of number theory. And generally we want our statements to be interpreted according to the standard model of number theory (which sort of makes numbers part of the "logic" rather than the thing the logic is operating on).

Comment author: bryjnar 14 November 2012 05:05:28AM 0 points [-]

I was assuming we've specified the behaviour of the numbers sufficiently in the background ;) But the difficulty of doing that is part and parcel of the FOL weirdness: you don't get the Lowenheim Skolem theorem in SOL! I was going to say that you need Compactness to prove it, but now that I think about it I don't know that you need it, although it's usually used in the proof of the upwards component.