• fknM
    link
    21 year ago

    Godels proof is quite clear. There are infinitely many assertions that are true but have no proof. Those assertions can be mapped to extant things. This is not an area that requires deliberation. If you are unfamiliar with the incompleteness theorum we can discuss it more. The fantastically great thing about this work is that it was the pursuit of a “complete” purely philosophical logic derivation of mathematical principles (the continuation of the work by Bertrand in the Principia Mathematica).

    The thing here is we are arguing two different points… You are arguing that empirical evidence can demonstrate the usefulness of models to explain more empirical evidence… Which is true. I am arguing that philosophy builds models. You aren’t wrong(except that part about not trying to prove the parts that are crucial for the scientific method… You are just wrong about that) and I am not wrong. We are arguing different things.

    • @AeonFelis
      link
      English
      11 year ago

      Godel’s proof is about our inability to prove some theorems mathematically, but that does not mean we cannot prove them scientifically. Such proofs, of course, will suffer from the same problem all scientific proofs have - a certain probability that even though our model is wrong, somehow by pure chance our tests ended up showing otherwise (in technical term - non-zero p values)

      except that part about not trying to prove the parts that are crucial for the scientific method… You are just wrong about that

      I’m not saying that one must never attempt to prove these foundations. What I’m saying is that if you try to prove them empirically (as oppose to how they are usually proved - mathematically) using the scientific method, you will run into the circular reasoning fallacy:

           -----> foundations >------
          /                          \
       proves                      proves
          \                          /
           --< scientific method <---