Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Omniscience and Cantor

I found an interesting debate between Plantinga and Grim, a mathematician on the possibility of omniscience (or anything else that would entail a quantification over all propositions): http://www.sunysb.edu/philosophy/faculty/pgrim/exchange.html. I'm working on a couple of ways around Grim's argument. One is Plantinga's approach, which I think merely leads to the idea that the set of valid properties is, at best, recursively enumerable (that it, there is no decision procedure for determining falsehood); an altogether unremarkable claim. Another is what is called the Skolem paradox, which some think show that levels of infinity are really relative, and as such a universal set I think could be exempt from a Cantorian argument; in fact, such a set could even be defined as one which cannot be put into correspondence with itself. However, I need to do some research as it could be possible that this interpretation of the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem has already been laid to rest. A third way is through an anti-Wittgensteinian maneuver: the world is made up of things, not facts. Fourthly, while Grim shows that there's a set of properties which cannot be put into one-to-one correpspondence with propositions, thereby entailing a new proposition, I think an argument can be made that there are at the same time at least as many propositions as properties, and even as many as their power set, their power set's power set, and so on, so there must be more propositions than powers. This doesn't solve the problem, but shows that there must be one somewhere within the argument. Finally, I guess one could resort to a form of nominalism, though I am hestitant to be a nominalist about abstract objects (physical objects I am ok with). I might buy TCR (theistic creative realism), which states that reality for God is nominalistic (though as opposed to theistic activism, he doesn't create logical laws - I need to see how this fits), which leads to a realism from our perspective.

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