On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 10:10 AM Steven D'Aprano
wrote:
>
> On Wed, 13 Jun 2018 12:43:12 +, Alister via Python-list wrote:
>
> > I have a theory that it's impossible to prove anything, but I can't
> > prove it.
>
> Heh, that reminds me of Stephen Pinker's comment from "Enlightenment Now":
>
> "one cannot reason that there's no such thing as reason"
>
> but on the other hand, Kurt Gödel successfully proved using mathematics
> that (sufficiently powerful) maths is either inconsistent or incomplete,
> and we can never tell which. In a sense, Gödel proved that it is
> impossible to prove *certain* things which are true, or disprove some
> which are false, but we have no way of proving which are which.
I'm not an expert, but my understanding of the Second Incompleteness
Theorem is that a consistent, sufficiently powerful formal system
cannot prove its own consistency. It doesn't mean that we can't prove
it in some other way.
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