“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, January 6, 2013

Panel with Katherine Hayles

Very nice talk by Hayles and an interesting divergence on metalanguage.

For Hayles Gödel showed that a metalanguage can pulverize an object language (Russell and Whitehead).

For me, Russell and Whitehead just is a metalanguage that Gödel turns back into an object language without a meta level, since it can say "This sentence cannot be proved."

He causes a supposed totality to go into a loop.

Gödel caused the concept of metalanguage to evaporate, not the object (language).

To exist (to be true) is to be inconsistent.
MP3 soon!

1 comment:

Bill Benzon said...

You know, Tim, I was looking at the Wikipedia article on Cantor diagonalization, or Cantor's diagonal method--I forget the exact title of the article--and it pointed out that Gödel's proof is based on the technique.