English

Self-referential theories

Logic 2020-08-27 v1

Abstract

We study the structure of families of theories in the language of arithmetic extended to allow these families to refer to one another and to themselves. If a theory contains schemata expressing its own truth and expressing a specific Turing index for itself, and contains some other mild axioms, then that theory is untrue. We exhibit some families of true self-referential theories that barely avoid this forbidden pattern.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.11535,
  title  = {Self-referential theories},
  author = {Samuel Allen Alexander},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.11535},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

25 pages. Accepted for publication in the Journal of Symbolic Logic