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What is a good example of a paradox?
#51
RE: What is a good example of a paradox?
Disagree.  From Gary's POV, he is telling a lie - making an intentionally false statement (as was said earlier, intent is relevant).  It doesn't matter one whit whether the rabbit in question exists for your and me, only whether it 'exists' for Gary.  When he shouts, 'There is no two-headed man-eating rabbit in my shed!', he is making what he believes to be a false statement, and doing it with the intent of not being locked up for a looney.

Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson
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#52
RE: What is a good example of a paradox?
I'm baaaack.

Is a lie relative? Gary thinks he is telling a lie if he has a, however irrational, belruve in the teo headed man-eating bunny in the shed. To the doctors he is stating a fact, there is no such bunny. Does delusion destroy or support the argument?

Fred experiences a life-changing event that convinces him that there is a god who affects his life in a meaningful wsy and decides to stand on a street corner and tell everyone about it. "God changed my life!" In his frame of reference he is telling the truth, to others he is deluded. To the brain doctor he has suffered a profound experience and is rationalising the effect of it in a way that seems true to him.

Could it be that all are right?
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#53
RE: What is a good example of a paradox?
(November 25, 2017 at 12:14 pm)Hammy Wrote: There are no true paradoxes, IMO, as they are all caused by either language ambiguities (or the fact that we have to do logic with language, and our own language isn't always up to the task with dealing with the ontology of the matter), but there are many examples of so-called paradoxes. The Liar's Paradox being the most classic example, but certainly IMO not being a true paradox.


Not sure what you have in mind by calling it a 'true paradox'. If you mean 'truly a paradox' then there are plenty and yes they have both to do with our language and logic.

Some are some in which what is asserted is false unless true, but no longer true if false, like the one I offered:

Their are two mistakes in this sentence.
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#54
RE: What is a good example of a paradox?
Quote:Their are two mistakes in this sentence.
Clever, but is that not some sort of "meta-statement"?
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#55
RE: What is a good example of a paradox?
You need to be able to make irrational choices so as to function as a rational agent.
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#56
RE: What is a good example of a paradox?
(November 27, 2017 at 8:34 am)Mathilda Wrote: You need to be able to make irrational choices so as to function as a rational agent.

And life gets boring without a bit of irrtionality and chaos!
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#57
RE: What is a good example of a paradox?
(November 26, 2017 at 1:40 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Disagree.  From Gary's POV, he is telling a lie - making an intentionally false statement (as was said earlier, intent is relevant).  It doesn't matter one whit whether the rabbit in question exists for your and me, only whether it 'exists' for Gary.  When he shouts, 'There is no two-headed man-eating rabbit in my shed!', he is making what he believes to be a false statement, and doing it with the intent of not being locked up for a looney.

Boru

Yes exactly he is lying about something that's true. That's what I'm saying. Not all lies are false statements and not all false statements are lies.

(November 26, 2017 at 2:44 pm)Whateverist Wrote: Not sure what you have in mind by calling it a 'true paradox'.  If you mean 'truly a paradox' then there are plenty and yes they have both to do with our language and logic.

I think they're only seen to be paradoxes because they're yet to be resolved. Many paradoxes have been shown to be confusions with logic or they are equivocations or language ambiguities and I'm suggesting that all of them are.

(November 27, 2017 at 8:34 am)Mathilda Wrote: You need to be able to make irrational choices so as to function as a rational agent.

Two senses of "rational" are being used there. That's the kind of thing I mean.

(November 26, 2017 at 2:44 pm)Whateverist Wrote: Some are some in which what is asserted is false unless true, but no longer true if false, like the one I offered:

Their are two mistakes in this sentence.

Again, I believe that Arthur Prior, the founder of temporal logic, had the correct answer to all forms of The Liar Paradox. Wikipedia explains it like this:

Quote:Arthur Prior asserts that there is nothing paradoxical about the liar paradox. His claim (which he attributes to Charles Sanders Peirce and John Buridan) is that every statement includes an implicit assertion of its own truth. Thus, for example, the statement "It is true that two plus two equals four" contains no more information than the statement "two plus two equals four", because the phrase "it is true that..." is always implicitly there. And in the self-referential spirit of the Liar Paradox, the phrase "it is true that..." is equivalent to "this whole statement is true and ...".
Thus the following two statements are equivalent:
This statement is false.
This statement is true and this statement is false.
The latter is a simple contradiction of the form "A and not A", and hence is false. There is therefore no paradox because the claim that this two-conjunct Liar is false does not lead to a contradiction. Eugene Mills and Neil Lefebvre and Melissa Schelein present similar answers.

It has seemed patently obvious to me that "true" is one of those words we use to merely contrast it with the opposite (false), but the word itself adds no meaning to a sentence. To say: "I am happy" or to say "It is true that I am happy" is to say the exact same thing. All sentences are already implicitly asserting their own truth so "This sentence is false" means "This statement is true and this statement is false" that is a contradiction, or it simply means "This statement is" blank. Because the true part by itself doesn't actually mean anything when added. The statement is supposedly true but it is saying... what? Nothing really.

As for your own version more specifically, I assume what you are getting at is the fact that if it is in fact false that there are two mistakes in the sentence because there's only one, then that itself is also another mistake so there's two. But again, the meta-reading of the statement is read on another level, so you're talking about a statement in two different ways, and in another way it's two entirely different statements, it's yet another ambiguity in the language rather than any genuine paradox. In this case it seems to be over the ambiguity over more than one sense of the word "statement" being used at once without pointing it out. Yet another equivocation.

My suspicion is that some of these ambiguities in so-called paradoxes are yet to be unpacked explicitly, but they are all clearly ambiguities to me and what seems to be a paradox indeed only seems to be one, and the seeming is due to a fault in our own inability to always recognize our own equivocations, or due to the limits of language, rather than any real incompleteness of logic and rather than something really being true and false at the same time, which is already by definition a logical impossibility if truly used in in the ordinary binary sense about the exact same thing.

Bertrand Russell Wrote:It is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies.
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#58
RE: What is a good example of a paradox?
The art of fighting without fighting.
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#59
RE: What is a good example of a paradox?
(November 28, 2017 at 5:34 am)energizer bunny Wrote: The art of fighting without fighting.

From one of my favorite movies!



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#60
RE: What is a good example of a paradox?
Wow, I didn't expect this thread to get so many
replies.
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