On 11/02/2026 21:53, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
Mathematicians have proven that many decision problems can not be
answered, all the nonsense about "idiosyncrasies of self-referential
logic" notwithstanding.
It's not at all clear to me that those unanswerables are properly
classified as "decision problem" unless one uses an auto-explication (my
term for when a term is both an explicatum and explicandum of an explication). Carnap's definition of explication excludes such an act
(though I don't know if he'd picked up the bad habit of using "decision problem" as an explicatum).
I think Carnap would have admitted "L-decision problem" as an explicatum
of the explicandum "decision problem". The nonsense act of calling pathologically self-referential problems as "L-decision problems" would
be obvious because one does not have a problem of choosing between only classifications "true" and "false" when one has merely been fooled into thinking those are candidates without a whole heap of others beside.
I hereby indulge myself with some old-timey assertive logistic
philosophy, you might call it a strawman, something to ponder and burn down:
We can understand the fallacy by making explicit the implicit false assumption: "the sentence after the conjunctive connector following can
be assigned no valuation but 'true' or 'false' AND blah-blah". That is
the cultural synergy covertly induced in the ponderer by a poetic form
of expression ("proposition" the explicatum, not the explicandum, it's another auto-explication) but it's not /well/ formalised in that it's a
mess of massive description and wonderment. I think usage of AND gives
us falsity for pathologically self-referential 'blah-blah' if we have
the right type-system but other connectives give us other, non-truth, classifications. A connective that means the implication of neither
truth nor falsity is also available. Of course, the ponderer has the inducement in the form of a volition to be disobedient and choose to
react in a variety of unassertive ways.
A proof is a proof.
Tautology.
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