An Editor Recalls Some Hopeless Papers (Q4392802)

This article is a reflection by the author (who has acted as referee and as editor for first rate logic journals) on various attempts (which were sent to him to be refereed) to refute Cantor's diagonal argument, which proves that there exists no 1-1 correspondence between the natural numbers and the real numbers. Of course all these refutation attempts fail. But the question that is put up for scrutiny in this paper is: which mistakes do the authors of these refutation attempts typically make, and what might we learn from these mistakes? A distinction is made between elementary logical mistakes (fallacies, failures to perceive logical validities), and failures to correctly understand instructions that are typically encountered in mathematical arguments (such as ``Suppose that ...''). The author turns to the psychological literature on how people actually reason for enlightenment on the logical mistakes. This literature left him disappointed: many of the mistakes that are often made in `refutations' of Cantor's argument do not naturally fit into any of the categories of mistakes distinguished in the psychological literature. To conclude, it is argued that the notion of assumptions in arguments is surrounded by philosophical puzzles: it has never been made clear what exactly we are asked to do when we are asked to assume that a proposition is true.