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Article 1648 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: erwin@trwacs.UUCP (Harry Erwin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,sci.philosophy.tech,comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: The Philosophical Foibles of John McCarthy
Message-ID: <443@trwacs.UUCP>
Date: 26 Nov 91 20:47:14 GMT
References: <1991Nov15.003438.11323@grebyn.com> <1991Nov15.160741.5495@husc3.harvard.edu> <JMC.91Nov24203029@SAIL.Stanford.EDU> <1991Nov25.180643.5898@husc3.harvard.edu>
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I'm bothered by some aspects of this argument. The distinction between
"facts" and "formal models" becomes fuzzy when you start looking at the
foundations of mathematics. It is true that there are true statements that
are not provable in the model that Goedel defined. But there are also
non-standard models that are equivalent to the standard model for most
interesting problems, but that define additional statements to be true or
false. The point is that these non-standard models are equivalent in terms
of our intuitive sense of "truth" to the standard model and only differ in
areas where we have no way of telling the truth or falsity of the system.
See Cohen's work plus the later work from the University of Pennsylvania.
Those arguments convinced me that Platonism is invalid, since ideal
objects appear not to be definable.

Cheers,
-- 
Harry Erwin
Internet: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com


