is true and in others of which that statement is false, so that the statement is left undecided by the axioms. Gödel's incompleteness theorems cast unexpected light on these two related questions. Gödel's first incompleteness theorem showed that no recursive extension of Principia could be both consistent and complete for arithmetic statements. (As mentioned above, Principia itself was already known to be incomplete for some non-arithmetic statements.) According to the theorem, within every sufficiently powerful recursive logical system (such as Principia), there exists a statement G that essentially reads, "The statement G cannot be proved." Such a statement is a sort of Catch-22: if G is provable, then it is false, and the system is therefore inconsistent; and if G is not provable, then it is true, and the system is therefore incomplete. Gödel's second incompleteness theorem (1931) shows that no formal system extending basic arithmetic can be used to prove its own consistency. Thus, the statement "there are no contradictions in the Principia system" cannot be proven in the Principia system unless there are contradictions in the system (in which case it can be proven both true and false). Wittgenstein 1919, 1939 By the second edition of PM, Russell had removed his axiom of reducibility to a new axiom (although he does not state it as such). Gödel 1944:126 describes it this way: "This change is connected with the new axiom that functions can occur in propositions only "through their values", i.e., extensionally . . . [this is] quite unobjectionable even from the constructive standpoint . . . provided that quantifiers are always restricted to definite orders". This change from a quasi-intensional stance to a fully extensional stance also restricts predicate logic to the second order, i.e. functions of functions: "We can decide that mathematics is to confine itself to functions of functions which obey the above assumption" (PM 2nd edition p. 401, Appendix C). This new proposal resulted in a dire outcome. An "extensional stance" and restriction to a second-order predicate logic means that a propositional function extended to all individuals such as "All 'x' are blue" now has to list all of the 'x' that satisfy (are true in) the proposition, listing them in a possibly infinite conjunction: e.g. x1 ∧ x2 ∧ . . . ∧ xn ∧ . . .. Ironically, this change came about as the result of criticism from Wittgenstein in his 1919