Re: Concept_sitting

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 8:26 PM, Alex Fink <000024@...> wrote:
> Oi, that's not what Goedel said.  He was talking about unprovable truths,
> sure, but already given a consistent formal theory which includes axioms.
> Axiomatisation has been an accepted practice in rigorous mathematics since
> the Greeks; that's one of the things that let Euclid's Elements remain a
> standard text for two millennia.  And if something's an axiom, then by
> definition it's provable; it's its own proof, basically.
Very well; I would say that this "proof" is about the same as the
thing gotten at by the famous thought experiment, "What Mary Didn't
Know": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary's_room - that is, it is only
self-proving in that it references something that is in the direct
experience of the people talking about it. (Like the color red, or
what the peak of an orgasm feels like: at-least-partially ineffable
qualia.)

This is certainly *not* the same sort of proof as is gotten by
syllogistic reasoning - or by analogy, the same thing as derivational
morphology - and I don't believe it should be called the same, for
fear of confusion.

- Sai