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A Brief Discussion on the Social Philosophical Significance of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems





Author(s)

YUAN Hongjian

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DOI:10.17265/2328-2177/2024.11.007

Independent Scholar, Wuhan, China

This paper applies Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems to the evolution and development of human social systems. Although Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems originated in the field of mathematics, their influence has long extended beyond mathematics, making an impact on philosophy, systems science, and the humanities and social sciences. The paper analyzes the autonomy and completeness of human social systems, arguing that evolving human societies are generally self-consistent. However, if the completeness of a human social system is compromised, the system either maintains self-consistency, ceases to evolve forward, enters a death spiral, and eventually decays and disintegrates. Or the system addresses the completeness issue, enters a state of non-self-consistency, introduces new axioms, becomes self-governing again, and enters a new form. From the sociological perspective, this is articulated as social revolution—the system continues to evolve forward; the absence of social revolution—the system does not evolve forward (Jin, 1988).

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, human society, logical system, self-consistency, completeness