By: Franca Driessen,
on 8/14/2016
For many months now this column has been examining logical/mathematical paradoxes. Strictly speaking, a paradox is a kind of argument. In literary theory, some sentences are also called paradoxes, but the meaning of the term is significantly different.
The post Paradoxes logical and literary appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Franca Driessen,
on 4/17/2016
One of the most famous, and most widely discussed, paradoxes is the Liar paradox. The Liar sentence is true if and only if it is false, and thus can be neither (unless it can be both). The variants of the Liar that I want to consider in this instalment arise by taking the implicit temporal aspect of the word “is” in the Liar paradox seriously.
The post Temporal liars appeared first on OUPblog.
By: RachelM,
on 1/17/2016
The Liar paradox is often informally described in terms of someone uttering the sentence: I am lying right now. If we equate lying with merely uttering a falsehood, then this is (roughly speaking) equivalent to a somewhat more formal, more precise version of the paradox that arises by considering a sentence like: "This sentence is false".
The post Lying, belief, and paradox appeared first on OUPblog.
By: RachelM,
on 10/10/2015
In a 1929 lecture, Martin Heidegger argued that the following claim is true: Nothing nothings. In German: “Das Nichts nichtet”. Years later Rudolph Carnap ridiculed this statement as the worst sort of meaningless metaphysical nonsense in an essay titled “Overcoming of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language”. But is this positivistic attitude reasonable?
The post Is “Nothing nothings” true? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: RachelM,
on 9/13/2015
Imagine that, on a Tuesday night, shortly before going to bed one night, your roommate says “I promise to only utter truths tomorrow.” The next day, your roommate spends the entire day uttering unproblematic truths like: 1 + 1 = 2.
The post Paradoxes and promises appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Helena Palmer,
on 7/12/2015
Here I want to present a novel version of a paradox first formulated by José Bernardete in the 1960s – one that makes its connections to the Yablo paradox explicit by building in the latter puzzle as a ‘part’. This is not the first time connections between Yablo’s and Bernardete’s puzzles have been noted (in fact, Yablo himself has discussed such links). But the version given here makes these connections particularly explicit.
The post A Yabloesque variant of the Bernardete Paradox appeared first on OUPblog.
