Independence results in Computer Science? (Preliminary Version)

Although there has been considerable additional work discussing limitations of formal proof techniques for Computer Science ([YO-73&77], [HAR-76], [HAR&HO-77], [HAJ-77&79], [GO-79]), these papers show only very general consequences of incompleteness: the stated results hold for all sufficiently powerful formal systems for Computer Science. Only the work of O'Donnell and of Lipton directly addresses the question of just how powerful formal axioms for Computer Science should be, and these two authors make rather radically different suggestions. We investigate this latter question: How powerful should a set of axioms be if it is to be adequate for Computer Science? In particular, in this paper we investigate the adequacy of the system of [LI-78] as a formal system for Computer Science.

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