1 research outputs found
Definitively Identifying an Inherent Limitation to Actual Cognition
A century ago, discoveries of a serious kind of logical error made separately
by several leading mathematicians led to acceptance of a sharply enhanced
standard for rigor within what ultimately became the foundation for Computer
Science. By 1931, Godel had obtained a definitive and remarkable result: an
inherent limitation to that foundation. The resulting limitation is not
applicable to actual human cognition, to even the smallest extent, unless both
of these extremely brittle assumptions hold: humans are infallible reasoners
and reason solely via formal inference rules. Both assumptions are contradicted
by empirical data from well-known Cognitive Science experiments. This article
investigates how a novel multi-part methodology recasts computability theory
within Computer Science to obtain a definitive limitation whose application to
human cognition avoids assumptions contradicting empirical data. The limitation
applies to individual humans, to finite sets of humans, and more generally to
any real-world entity.Comment: 45 pages, 5 figures; changed author's email addres