Re:Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in Bash
by mannykannot on Friday February 25, 2022 @10:35AM
(#30468364)
> some argue there are formal analogues which are genuine paradoxes...
Isn't this getting a bit circular, as it seems to be using the presumed existence of a formal analogue to justify the informal Berry's paradox? If it has a paradoxical formal analogue, then it does not stand as an example of a useful yet unavoidably informal paradox.
Also, given that there seem to be more than one plausible formal analogue, not all of which are paradoxes, does the dispute not just re-form around which is the real formal analogue? That's what seems to be happening in the exchange of papers from which your example was taken.
I think when you say "pure", you actually mean "formal" or "symbolic" or "mathematical". Many believe that there is much more to logic than a mere formalism – although that itself is a major point of contention in the philosophy of logic.
> You might be able to derive philosophical or empirical meaning from an interpretation of some non-precise statement, but you shouldn't hope that such an interpretation is a valid mathematical theorem.
Berry's paradox may not be a mathematical paradox – but that doesn't show it is not a paradox. And, even if it is not a mathematical paradox, it nonetheless made a valuable contribution to mathematics, by inspiring the construction of formal analogues, some of which turned out not to be paradoxical (but nonetheless interesting). However, I don't think it necessarily follows, that just because those formal analogues turned out not to be actual paradoxes, that its natural language version cannot be a real paradox. And, some argue there are formal analogues which are genuine paradoxes – see for example https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ajl/article/download/4972/4634/73...