Showing posts with label Gödel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gödel. Show all posts

Friday, May 4, 2012

No gentlemen are bankers

Pure logic, according to Ernest Nagel (and James Newman) at least. In the classic book on Gödel's theorem the following example appears:
Where g stands for gentlemen, p for polite, and b for bankers, with the bar on top meaning not. So gentlemen are contained in polite, bankers are contained in not-polite, so it follows that gentlemen are contained in not-bankers. Of course you can substitute polite with other epithets. But they got it right. As I said, it's pure logic.

Was Bob Heilbroner a leftist?

Janek Wasserman, in the book I commented on just the other day, titled The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War...