RE: What is a good example of a paradox?
November 28, 2017 at 4:09 am
(This post was last modified: November 28, 2017 at 4:34 am by Edwardo Piet.)
(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.
