By: RachelM,
on 10/16/2016
Before looking at the person-less variant of the Bernedete paradox, lets review the original: Imagine that Alice is walking towards a point – call it A – and will continue walking past A unless something prevents her from progressing further.
The post A person-less variant of the Bernadete paradox appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Franca Driessen,
on 9/18/2016
Let us say that a sentence is periphrastic if and only if there is a single word in that sentence such that we can remove the word and the result (i) is grammatical, and (ii) has the same truth value as the original sentence.
The post Periphrastic puzzles appeared first on OUPblog.
By: RachelM,
on 3/13/2016
A theory is inconsistent if we can prove a contradiction using basic logic and the principles of that theory. Consistency is a much weaker condition that truth: if a theory T is true, then T consistent, since a true theory only allows us to prove true claims, and contradictions are not true. There are, however, infinitely many different consistent theories that we can construct.
The post The consistency of inconsistency claims 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 8/9/2015
A 'Liar cycle' is a finite sequence of sentences where each sentence in the sequence except the last says that the next sentence is false, and where the final sentence in the sequence says that the first sentence is false.
The post Curry paradox cycles 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.
