Re: "Found: the human brain's moral engine"

dkirsh who-is-at lsu.edu
Tue, 26 Oct 1999 15:44:57 -0500

It turns out that Quining is one of the mechanisms that the logician Kurt
Godel
used to prove his famous "Incompleteness Theorem" ---that for logical
systems
beyond a certain minimum of complexity there always will be true
statements that cannot be proven. For an absolutely hilarious romp through
the crevices of Quining take a look at "Air on G's String," pages 431-437
in
Douglas Hoftstadter's Pulitzer Prize winning classic, Godel, Escher, Bach,
1980, Vintage Books.

David

"Paul Dillon" <dillonph who-is-at northcoast.com> on 10/26/99 09:12:47 AM

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cc: (bcc: David H Kirshner/dkirsh/LSU)



Subject: Re: "Found: the human brain's moral engine"

Phil,

I see.

W.V. Quine, British empiricist philosopher and logician, famous for (among
other things), posing a problem called "quining"; i.e., sentences of the
structure:

"is not a sentence" is not a sentence,

these can be sung to a good Minnesota positivist polka beat. Makes one
fear
the day when mailing lists no longer require reading, we'll simply upload
messages as to an answering machine.

which is almost as bad as being one's own grandpa or 3+3=5 which happens
when I have three children and my partner has three children and together
we
have 5 children.

Paul