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From: ag@sics.se (Anders G|ransson)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Intuition and doubt (was Re: Minds, machines, and Godel)
Message-ID: <1991Feb28.193742.15941@sics.se>
Date: 28 Feb 91 19:37:42 GMT
References: <16462.9102272325@s4.sys.uea.ac.uk>
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In-Reply-To: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk's message of 27 Feb 91 23:25:44 GMT



Excuse me for butting in!

To simplify this it seems to me that Richard essentially holds
the position that trust in first order peano-arithmetic can be based
only on the (empirical) observation that no contradiction has yet been
observed.

My point is simply that nobody uses first order peano-arithmetic
for proving theorems of arithmetic. What _is_ used must be just
about the same methods as Gauss used (whatever they were they
were not first order Peano-arithmetic). 

A similar case would be to trust an engine, regardless of how it
is constructed (how the blueprints look), because it has up till
now worked. Torkel holds that something after all can be gotten
out of the blueprint (with the aid of something like general
mechanics).
What I am suspcious of in Richards argument is that so to speak
the engine he trusts in because it works has never been assigned
to any real mission. Only the blueprint is in reality used.
 




--

name(!): Anders G|ransson