Showing posts with label sound formal systems are incomplete. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sound formal systems are incomplete. Show all posts

Monday, June 24, 2013

Sound formal systems with sufficiently expressive languages are incomplete

In chapter 5, Peter Smith uses a counting argument to prove that sound axiomatized formal theories (AFTs) that can express a good amount of arithmetic are incomplete. In short: since their set of theorems is effectively enumerable but their set of true sentences is not, the two sets must be different. In a sound theory, the theorems are all true. Therefore, some truths must remained unproved in such theories.

Let's start with a definition. The language of an AFT of arithmetic is sufficiently expressive if and only if:
  1. It can express quantification over numbers, and
  2. It can express every effectively decidable two-place numerical relation.
Now, to the pivotal theorem of this chapter: