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46 - Looking back

Peter Smith
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Let's finish by taking stock one last time. At the end of the last Interlude, we gave a road-map for the final part of the book. So we won't repeat the gist of that detailed local guide to recent chapters; instead, we'll stand further back and give a global overview. And let's concentrate on the relationship between our various proofs of incompleteness. Think of the book, then, as falling into four main parts:

(a) The first part (Chapters 1 to 8), after explaining various key concepts, proves two surprisingly easy incompleteness theorems. Theorem 6.3 tells us that if T is a sound effectively axiomatized theory whose language is sufficiently expressive, then T can't be negation-complete. And Theorem 7.2 tells us that we can weaken the soundness condition and require only consistency if we strengthen the other condition (from one about what T can express to one about what it can prove): if T is a consistent effectively axiomatized theory which is sufficiently strong, then T again can't be negation-complete.

Here the ideas of being sufficiently expressive/sufficiently strong are defined in terms of expressing/capturing enough effectively decidable numerical properties or relations. So the arguments for our two initial incompleteness theorems depend on a number of natural assumptions about the intuitive idea of effective decidability. And the interest of those theorems depends on the assumption that being sufficiently expressive/sufficiently strong is a plausible desideratum on formalized arithmetics.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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  • Looking back
  • Peter Smith, University of Cambridge
  • Book: An Introduction to Gödel's Theorems
  • Online publication: 05 March 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139149105.047
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  • Looking back
  • Peter Smith, University of Cambridge
  • Book: An Introduction to Gödel's Theorems
  • Online publication: 05 March 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139149105.047
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Looking back
  • Peter Smith, University of Cambridge
  • Book: An Introduction to Gödel's Theorems
  • Online publication: 05 March 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139149105.047
Available formats
×