Philosophy15 Episode 75: The trouble with pragmatism #2

[jameslovell]

“A pragmatist is a positivist with a broken heart.” 💔

[TorneHeichou]

Would love to see y’all do a video on Sellars. Thanks for all the free content you provide to students and lifelong learners.

[jrshipley]

Loved the final comments about pragmatism and positivism. Want to hear more.

[Grizabeebles]

*Raises Hand*
Um, I've been turning an issue related to logic and ethics over and over in my head for a couple years now. Since you guys are actual professionals and everything, is it okay if I ask you two to weigh in?

There's been a thing that's been known in the maths world for a while now - that there's no algorithm for truth. There's a bunch of examples - The Barber Paradox, Berry's Paradox, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, The set of all sets that do not contain themseleves, The Halting Probem - the list just goes on and on.

Is it therefore safe to say that it is logically proven that any system capable of algorithmic computation is inherently incomplete, contains internal contradictions, and/or infinite loops? If it is, then it strikes me that all of Natural Law Theory has a serious hole in it.

While the individual natural laws themselves are probably best described as axioms, any combination of two or more natural laws constitutes a set of rules for solving problems through algorithmic computation. Doesn't it? Like, isn't that the whole end goal Thomas Hobbes was working toward? The way I understand it, the dude was trying to logic his way into creating a utopia via procedural generation.

If I'm on the right track here, this could also certainly help explain the old adages like "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink" as well as more modern social-media phenomena. As far as I'm aware, cognitive dissonance has already been shown to be connected to contradictions between deeply-held foundational axioms. Could conspiracy theories be a manifestation of infinite logical regress the same way Star Trek fans fill in the gaps and "continuty errors" between the various shows with speculation and fan-fiction?

*Bottom line:* Am I going nuts or am I on to something here? Because I haven't been able to acees any literature that has anything to say on the subject.