Reflections on Church's thesis (Q1105577)

The author reports and discusses some points from [\textit{J. C. Webb}, Mechanism, mentalism and metamathematics. An essay on finitism. Dordrecht etc.: D. Reidel Publishing Company (1980; Zbl 0454.03001)]. He first presents an easy argument according to which, assuming the completeness of a system F such as Gödel considered, one would obtain a contradiction to Church's thesis. He then reports that ``In fact, historically, beginning immediately after Curch's thesis became public, Kleene used Church's thesis to give proofs of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.'' His second subject is the following: ``One sometimes encounters statements asserting that Gödel's work laid the foundation for Church's and Turing's results, as for example in Webb [loc. cit., p. 16, lines 6--7]. It seems to me that the truth is that Church's approach through \(\lambda\)-definability and Turing's through his machine concept had quite independent roots (motivations), and would have led them to their main results even if Gödel's paper [\textit{K. Gödel}, ``Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der \textit{Principia Mathematica} und verwandter Systeme. I'', Monatsh. Math. 38, 173--198 (1931; Zbl 0002.00101)] had not already appeared.'' Kleene finally addresses an argument reporeted by Webb [loc. cit., p. 222]: ``Gödel \dots objects that Turing `completely disregards' that (G) `Mind in its use, is not static, but constantly developing'. \dots Gödel granted that (F) The human computer is capable of only finitely many internal (mental) states. holds `at each stage of the mind's development', but says that (G)' `\dots there is no reason why this number [of mental states] should not converge to infinity in the course of its development.''' Kleene's point is: ``I reject that (G)' could have any bearing on what number-theoretic functions are effectively calculable. (Indeed, Webb so argues)''. This is elaborated in some detail.