Wittgenstein on Gödel: The newly published remarks (Q1863946)

The recent CD-ROM publication of Wittgenstein's Nachlaß by the Bergen project provides evidence supporting the author's earlier interpretation (in his ``Wittgenstein's inversion of Gödel's theorem'' [Erkenntnis 51, 173-206 (2000; Zbl 0961.03002)] of Wittgenstein's attitude to Gödel's incompleteness proofs. Rodych rejects accusations that Wittgenstein did not properly unterstand the First Incompleteness Theorem and holds that for Wittgenstein even a strict finitist (as Wittgenstein was) must regard Gödel's proposition as exceptional, either as not a genuine mathematical proposition at all, or as meaningful but in some way anomalous. Gödel did not prove that his proposition was unprovable, but only that if a given system, say Peano Arithmetic, is consistent, then it is unprovable; and Wittgenstein did not have good reasons to accept the antecedent of that conditional. Nor is the Gödelian proposition usable, either in further proofs or in extra-systemic applications.