An Editor Recalls Some Hopeless Papers

DOI10.2307/421003MaRDI QIDQ4392802zbMATH OpenOpenAlexDBLPWikidataFDO

Authors Wilfrid Hodges

Publication date 14 February 2002

Published in The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL http://www.math.ucla.edu/~asl/bsl/0401-toc.htm

zbMATH Keywords

Cantor's diagonal argumentfallacyhypothetical argument

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Methodology of mathematics (00A35) Sociology (and profession) of mathematics (01A80) History of mathematical logic and foundations (03-03)

Review text

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.

Recommendations

• What is wrong with Cantor's diagonal argument?
• Cantor's diagonal procedure and set theory (history of science and logical contexts).
• Elements of a Phenomenological Justification of Logical Principles, including an Appendix with Mathematical Doubts concerning some Proofs of Cantor on the Transfiniteness of the Set of Real Numbers†
• The Cantor diagonal

Cited in

(7)

• Mathematics and argumentation
• Naive infinitism: the case for an inconsistency approach to infinite collections
• A straightened proof for the uncountability of R
• Cantor's diagonal procedure and set theory (history of science and logical contexts).
• Mathematical arguments and distributed knowledge
• The parallel structure of mathematical reasoning
• Wittgenstein's diagonal argument: a variation on Cantor and Turing

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