Redundancies in the Hilbert-Bernays derivability conditions for Gödel's second incompleteness theorem

Abstract

This paper presents three generalizations of the Second Incompleteness Theorem of Gödel (see [2]) which apply to a broader class of formal systems than previous generalizations (as, e.g., the generalization in [1]).The content of all three of our results is that it is versions of the third derivability condition of Hilbert and Bernays (see p. 286 of [3]) which are crucial to Gödel's theorem. The second derivability condition plays some role in certain logics, but even there, only in the far weaker form of a definability condition (see Theorem 2).The elimination of the first derivability condition allows the application of the Consistency Theorem to cut-free logics which cannot prove that they are closed under cut.It is Theorem 1 which will probably have primary interest for readers who are not concerned with technical proof theory or with foundations, for it treats logics with quantifiers, and in that case one can dispose entirely of the first and second derivability conditions. The derivation of this result requires a “new twist” on old arguments. Specifically, we use a new variation on the standard self-referential lemma (this is Lemma 5.1 of [l]) to obtain a somewhat different self-referential construction than has previously been employed (this is our lemma in §2 below). With this new construction, we consider the sentence φ which “expresses” the fact: “My negation is provable.” Then, using hypotheses associated with Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem, one shows that ⊢¬φ is impossible in a consistent logic. Finally, using only a version of the third Hilbert-Bernays derivability condition, one shows that the provability of the consistency statement implies ⊢¬φ, and hence that consistency is unprovable.