Abstract

Gödel’s incompleteness results apply to formal theories for which syntactic constructs can be given names, in the same language, so that some basic syntactic operations are representable in the theory. It is now customary to derive these results from the fixed point theorem (also known as the reflection theorem), which asserts the existence of sentences that “speak about themselves”. Let T be the theory and, for each wff φ, letpφqbe the term that serves as its name. Then the theorem says that, for any wff α(v) (with one free variable), there exists a sentence β for which: T ` β ↔ α(pβq) β is sometimes called the fixed point of α(v). All that is needed for the fixed point theorem is that the diagonal function, the one that maps each φ(v) toφ(p(φ(v)q)), be representable in T. The construction of β is more transparent if we assume that the functions is represented by a term of the language, diag(x). This means that the following holds for each φ(v): T ` diag(pφ(v)q) =pφ(pφ(v)q)q (Here ‘= ’ is the equality sign of the formal language; we use it also to denote equality in our metalanguage.) In other words, we can prove in T, for each particular argument, what the

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