Quine, Hofstadter, Gödel again
During some recent traveling, I re-read some sections of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. Of particular interest was a step in the proof of Kurt Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem which involved substituting a variable of a formula with the formula itself. Hofstadter calls this peculiar operation “quining” after the logician W. V. Quine, who wrote extensively about self-reference. As with the previous times I read through that part, I noticed that the operation didn’t specify a variable for substitution like substitutions generally do, but instead performed substitution on all free variables, which is something I haven’t encountered anywhere else. This oddity wasn’t even mentioned, much less justified. Unlike after my previous reads, this time I decided to figure out why it was performed that way.
Now, the more interesting parts of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem involve what we now call Gödel coding to demonstrate that classes of logical systems can represent quining their own formulas and verifying their own proofs, the latter of which was very surprising at the time. But those parts turn out to be unnecessary for dealing with this small facet of Gödel’s proof, so let’s just deal with the proof’s final proposition, which is comparatively simple and straightforward: given that a logical system supports the operations of quining and proof verification (and logical conjunction and negation, and an existential quantifier), that logical system is incomplete (or inconsistent).