All of tickli's Comments + Replies
I think that Theo. 2 of your paper, in a sense, produces only non-standard models. Am I correct?
Here is my reasoning:
If we apply Theo. 2 of the paper to a theory T containing PA, we can find a sentence G such that "G <=> Pr("G")=0" is a consequence of T. ("Pr" is the probability predicate inside L'.)
If P(G) is greater than 1/n (I use P to speak about probability over the distribution over models of L'), using the reflection scheme, we get that with probability one, "Pr("G")>1/n" is true. This mean...
This is right. (I think we point out in the paper that the model necessarily contains non-standard infinitesimals.) But an interesting question is: can this distribution assign any model a positive probability? I would guess not (e.g. because P("G") is uniformly random for some "G").
The main theorem of the paper (Theo. 2) does not seem to me to accomplish the goals stated in the introduction of the paper. I think that it might sneakily introduce a meta-language and that this is what "solves" the problem.
What I find unsatisfactory is that the assignment of probabilities to sentences is not shown to be definable in L. This might be too much to ask, but if nothing of the kind is required, the reflection principles lack teeth. In particular, I would guess that Theo. 2 as stated is trivial, in the sense that you can simply take...
You are completely right, and thanks for the correction! A new version with this problem fixed should be up in a bit.
(The actual proof of theorem 2 establishes the correct thing, there is just a ' missing from the statement.)
Actually, I believe you've found a bug in the paper which everyone else seems to have missed so far, but fortunately it's just a typo in the statement of the theorem! The quantification should be over L', not over L, and the proof does prove this much stronger statement. The statement in the paper is indeed trivial for the reason you say.
Given the stronger statement, the reason you can't just have P have value 0 or 1 is sentences like G <=> P('G') < 0.5: if P(G) = 0, by reflection it would follow that P(G) = 1, and if P(G) = 1, then P(not G) = 0, and by reflection it would follow that P(not G) = 1.
I agree with your guess and I think that I see a way of proving it.
Let us make the same assumptions as in Theo. 2 and assume that T contains PA.
Let G be any sentence of L'. We can build a second sentence G2 such that "G2 <=> ( G and (Pr(G and G2)< p))" for P(G)/3< p <2P(G)/3, using diagonalization. From this and the reflection scheme, it should be possible to prove that P(G and G2) and P(G and not G2) are both smaller than (2/3)P(G).
Repeating the argument above, we can show that any complete theory in L' must have vanishing probability and therefore every model must also have vanishing probability.