Feasibilism, Explication, and the Cobham-Edmonds Thesis

Abrahim Ladha; Yiran Luo; Alan Tian

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arXiv · 2607.00315

Feasibilism, Explication, and the Cobham-Edmonds Thesis

Abrahim Ladha·Yiran Luo·Alan Tian

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Abstract

While the Church-Turing thesis asserts that effective calculability explicates to sets decidable by a Turing machine, the Cobham-Edmonds thesis asserts that feasible computation explicates to the complexity class $\mathsf{P}$, those decidable by a polynomial-time bounded Turing machine. The Church-Turing thesis has been placed under rigorous scrutiny and has several convincing arguments in its favor, but the Cobham-Edmonds thesis has not undergone a similar examination. Many of the arguments in its favor simply suggest that $\mathsf{P}$ is a useful assumption, rather than a necessary target. This paper presents analogous arguments in favor of the Cobham-Edmonds thesis.

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Abrahim Ladha, Yiran Luo, Alan Tian. 2026-07-01. Feasibilism, Explication, and the Cobham-Edmonds Thesis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00315

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