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Re: Turing vs. Godel (Newbie Question)

Subject: Re: Turing vs. Godel Newbie Question
From: Stephen Harris
Date: Wed, 04 Oct 2006 23:24:00 GMT
Newsgroups: sci.logic
Alan Smaill wrote:
"Charlie-Boo" <shymathguy@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Alan Smaill, Charlie-Boo:

on what specific basis (e.g. excerpts from some
publications) do you say that Manna & Waldinger did not change the
background logic?
See the footnote on p28 of

 129.215.101.90:1001/publications/PICTworkingpapers/WP38.pdf
"The page cannot be dispayed" : (

works for me ...


Content of footnotes:

38. MacKenzie, Donald, Negotiating arithmetic, constructing proof:
the sociology of mathematics and information technology. download.pdf

5 3See, e.g., J. Van Heijenoort (ed.), From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). Some of Brouwer's reasons for doubting an apparently obvious principle can be seen in the following quotation: 'Now consider the principum tertii exclusi [law of excluded middle]: It claims that every supposition is either true or false; in mathematics this means that for every supposed imbedding of a system into another, satisfying certain given conditions, we can either accomplish such an imbedding by a construction, or arrive by a construction at the arrestment of the process which would lead to the imbedding. It follows that the question of the validity of the principum tertii exclusi is equivalent to the question whether unsolvable mathematical problems can exist. There is not a shred of a proof for the conviction, which has sometimes been put forward that there exist no unsolvable mathematical problems ... in infinite systems the principum tertii exclusi is as yet not reliable ... So long as this proposition is unproved, it must be considered as uncertain whether problems like the following are solvable: Is there in the decimal expansion of [pi] a digit which occurs more often than any other one? ... And it likewise remains uncertain whether the more general mathematical problem: Does the principum tertii exclusi hold in mathematics without exception? is solvable ... In mathematics it is uncertain whether the whole of logic is admissible and it is uncertain whether the problem of its admissibility is decidable': Brouwer, 'The Unreliability of the Logical Principles', in Brouwer, op. cit.note 42, 107-11, at 109-11, emphases deleted.


5 4I am drawing here on Bloor, op. cit. note 10, 124-36.
5 5D.C. Makinson, Topics in Modern Logic (London: Methuen, 1973), 27-28.
5 6Cliff B. Jones, Systematic Software Development using VDM, second
edition (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall, 1990), 24.
5 7'Unless we have a philosophical commitment to intuitionism,
maintaining constructiveness when it is not required can only make a
proof system more cumbersome to use. We have seen that certain
programs cannot be derived from their specifications in a constructive
logic, but can be derived in a classical logic upon which minimal
restrictions have been imposed ... ': Zohar Manna and Richard Waldinger,
'Constructive Logic considered Obstructive' (typescript, n.d.), 8.

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