X-Git-Url: http://lambda.jimpryor.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=lambda.git;a=blobdiff_plain;f=week3.mdwn;h=a55659cb97b6e0f12616770115fc8680eb2ed821;hp=f83d377c90296d304bacae0175c8459391bf8fdd;hb=cd20a0a226f35177c21ef48bcabfc59316e3e489;hpb=7ee83a5cebdf94623bfce3edc2dfad4f93c79c9a diff --git a/week3.mdwn b/week3.mdwn index f83d377c..a55659cb 100644 --- a/week3.mdwn +++ b/week3.mdwn @@ -582,3 +582,40 @@ See Barwise and Etchemendy's 1987 OUP book, [The Liar: an essay on truth and circularity](http://tinyurl.com/2db62bk) for an approach that is similar, but expressed in terms of non-well-founded sets rather than recursive functions. + +HOWEVER, you should be cautious about feeling too comfortable with +these results. Thinking again of the truth-teller paradox, yes, +ω is *a* fixed point for `I`, and perhaps it has +some a privileged status among all the fixed points for `I`, being the +one delivered by Y and all. + +But one could ask: look, literally every formula is a fixed point for +`I`, since + + X <~~> I X + +for any choice of X whatsoever. + +So the Y combinator is only guaranteed to give us one fixed point out +of infinitely many---and not always the intuitively most useful +one. (For instance, the squaring function has zero as a fixed point, +since 0 * 0 = 0, and 1 as a fixed point, since 1 * 1 = 1, but `Y +(\x. mul x x)` doesn't give us 0 or 1.) So why in the reasoning we've +just gone through should we be reaching for just this fixed point at +just this juncture? + +One obstacle to thinking this through is the fact that a sentence +normally has only two truth values. We might consider instead a noun +phrase such as + +(3) the entity that this noun phrase refers to + +The reference of (3) depends on the reference of the embedded noun +phrase *this noun phrase*. It's easy to see that any object is a +fixed point for this referential function: if this pen cap is the +referent of *this noun phrase*, then it is the referent of (3), and so +for any object. + +Ultimately, in the context of this course, these paradoxes are more +useful as a way of gaining leverage on the concepts of fixed points +and recursion, rather than the other way around.