Frage

I was reading the question Consistency and completeness imply soundness? and the first statement in it says:

I understand that soundness implies consistency.

Which I was quite puzzled about because I thought soundness was a weaker statement than consistency (i.e. I thought consistent systems had to be sound but I guess its not true). I was using the informal definition Scott Aaronson was using in his 6.045/18.400 course at MIT for consistency and Soundness:

  1. Soundness = A proof system is sound if all the statements it proves are actually true (everything provable is True). i.e. IF ( $\phi$ is provable) $\implies$ ($\phi$ is True). So IF (there is a path to a formula) THEN (that formula is True)
  2. Consistency = a consistent system never proves A and NOT(A). So only one A or its negation can be True.

Using those (perhaps informal) definitions in mind I constructed the following example to demonstrate that there is a system that is sound but not consistent:

$$ CharlieSystem \triangleq \{ Axioms=\{A, \neg A \}, InferenceRules=\{NOT(\cdot) \} \}$$

The reason it's I thought it was it was a sound system is because by assumption the axioms are true. So A and not A are both true (yes I know the law of excluded middle is not included). Since the only inference rule is negation we get that we can reach both A and not A from the axioms and reach each other. Thus, we only reach True statements with respect to this system. However, of course the system is not consistent because we can prove the negation of the only statement in the system. Therefore, I have demonstrated that a sound system might not be consistent. Why is this example incorrect? What did I do wrong?

In my head this makes sense intuitively because soundness just says that once we start from and axiom and crank the inference rules we only reach at destinations (i.e statements) that are True. However, it does not really say which destination we arrive. However, consistency says that we can only reach destination that are reach either $A$ or $\neg A$ (both not both). So every consistent system must include the law of excluded middle as a axiom, which of course I did not and then just included the negation of the only axiom as the only other axiom. So it doesn't feel I did anything too clever, but somehow something is wrong?


I just realize it could be a problem because I am using Scott's informal definition. Even before I wrote the question I did check wikipedia but their definition didn't make sense to me. In particular the part that they say:

with respect to the semantics of the system

their full quote is:

every formula that can be proved in the system is logically valid with respect to the semantics of the system.

Keine korrekte Lösung

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