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1093/philmat/nkj003
Are There Absolutely Unsolvable Problems?
Godels Dichotomy
SOLOMON FEFERMAN*
This is a critical analysis of the first part of Godels 1951 Gibbs lecture
on certain philosophical consequences of the incompleteness theorems.
Godels discussion is framed in terms of a distinction between objective
mathematics and subjective mathematics, according to which the former
consists of the truths of mathematics in an absolute sense, and the latter
consists of all humanly demonstrable truths. The question is whether
these coincide; if they do, no formal axiomatic system (or Turing
machine) can comprehend the mathematizing potentialities of human
thought, and, if not, there are absolutely unsolvable mathematical
problems of diophantine form.
Either . . . the human mind . . . infinitely surpasses the powers of any
finite machine, or else there exist absolutely unsolvable diophantine
problems.
1. Does Subjective Mathematics Coincide with
Objective Mathematics?
The above striking dichotomy was enunciated by Kurt Godel in a lecture
entitled Some basic theorems on the foundations of mathematics and
their implications, on the day after Christmas, 1951, at a meeting of the
American Mathematical Society at Brown University in Providence,
Rhode Island. The lecture itself was the twenty-fifth in a distinguished
series set up by the Society to honor the nineteenth-century American
mathematician, Josiah Willard Gibbs, famous for his contributions to both
pure and applied mathematics. Soon after Godel delivered the Gibbs
lecture he wrote of his intention to publish it, but he never did so; after he
died, the text
1
languished with a number of other important essays and