| Sumario: | The article focuses on the concept of effectiveness. The following definition of effectiveness has come to be widely accepted in the discussions of Church's thesis in the literature. A task is effectively performable if there exist explicit instructions for performing it. The author begins by discussing this definition and show that while this definition is very useful in the context of Turing machines and programs, it is nonetheless circular and, therefore, useless in more general contexts where one is investigating a new situation with a view to knowing what an appropriate formal definition of effectiveness in this context might be.
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