English

Incompleteness theorems via Turing category

Logic 2024-12-19 v1 Logic in Computer Science

Abstract

We give a reframing of Godel's first and second incompleteness theorems that applies even to some undefinable theories of arithmetic. The usual Hilbert-Bernays provability conditions and the diagonal lemma are replaced by a more direct diagonalization argument, from first principles, based in category theory and in a sense analogous to Cantor's original argument. To this end, we categorify the theory G\"odel encodings, which might be of independent interest. In our setup, the G\"odel sentence is computable explicitly by construction even for Σ20\Sigma ^{0} _{2} theories (likely extending to Σn0\Sigma ^{0} _{n}). In an appendix, we study the relationship of our reframed second incompleteness theorem with arguments of Penrose.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.14084,
  title  = {Incompleteness theorems via Turing category},
  author = {Yasha Savelyev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.14084},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

This also corrects and supersedes 2208.04752

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:40:51.942Z