Le 07-août-05, à 22:41, John M a écrit :
> Bruno, just got the news, maybe you are interested:
>
> Torkel Franzén, and is entitled Gödel's Theorem: An
> Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse. [ISBN
> 1568812388] As evidenced from the title, the primary
> focus of the book is to identify the specific nature
> of these theorems, where they apply directly, and
> where they do not apply directly, and where they are
> interpreted entirely erroneously.
Thanks for the reference. It could be interesting. It is true that many
people misunderstand Godel's incompleteness theorems and that there are
some abuses. But for exactly that reason, there are also abuses by
logicians of not considering any text on Godel which is not written by
a mathematician! The "abuses" are going thus in both direction. In
particular the great french logician Jean-Yves Girard is quite unfair
in his critics of Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach", which is
100% correct on Godel, and on the relation between Godel and Mechanism,
which is rather rare, indeed, for a physicist work on incompleteness.
Personally, I have opted (in the early seventies) to be a
mathematician to minimize the risk of being wrong on incompleteness,
given that I realized very soon its impact on biology (at least), then
on machine psychology/theology and physics.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Mon Aug 08 2005 - 06:00:42 PDT