Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
I'll bite. How? Seriously, what sort of negative do you think you can prove?
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I'm with ApK here - that generalised claim always really annoys me too. Sure, there are some negatives you can't prove, but there are many positives you can't prove either. Many (most?) assertions can be phrased in a positive or negative way - does that change their provability?
Consider the assertion: "there are no two integers such that one divided by the other yields the square root of two". Clearly a negative assertion, but trivially provable.
Whenever I've had this argument with anyone, it quickly reduces to a weaker assertion: "there's a subset of negative assertions which are unprovable". No argument there, but it's not what the original claim states.