Borges, Gödel y etnolinguística o una prueba lógico-literaria de la incompletitud de los lenguajes recursivos

Abstract

This paper addresses some questions of philosophical interest based on the proposal by Martínez and Piñeiro of a computer program that, by means of an algorithm based on the Cantor diagonals method, could generate a magnified Babel library, emulating the library imagined by Borges in his homonymous text. This mechanism could produce all the texts of a language, which would include the subset of its true sentences and all possible translations of true sentences in other languages. So, could this mechanism generate all possible true statements? The work answers the question negatively with a Godelian-inspired argument. The argument intersperses logical considerations, literary devices inspired by Borges and examples of ethnolinguistic translation. It aims, more than technical rigor, to the production of an original perspective on the problem raised.