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Posted Aug 16, 1999 by Peter Hilton
There's no such thing as a paradox. A paradox is just an unresolved misunderstanding.
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Posted Oct 20, 1999 by Lupa Mirabilis, Serious Inquisitor
No, not always. There's "this sentence is false," for instance, the simplest and best example out there.
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Posted Oct 20, 1999 by Bluebottle
The thing with paradoxes is that so many of them are impossible to prove - ie, the "going back in time and killing your grandfather" one or "being your own father/mother/girlfriend" paradox. They're just so unrelated to everyday life it seems as if they don't really exist.
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Posted Oct 20, 1999 by Peter Hilton
Yes, always. There is no paradox with the sentence "This sentence is false.", just an unresolved misunderstanding. You presume that it has a truth value, which it does not; it makes no sense to ask whether it is true or false.
This is because not all 'sentences' are 'well-formed', even if they look like assertions.
In the same way, the sentence "Hello!" does not have a truth value - surely you don't think it is true or false (unless your're a Perl programmer who things that all non-empty strings are true).
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Posted Oct 20, 1999 by Lupa Mirabilis, Serious Inquisitor
But "Hello" doesn't have a truth value because it isn't an assertion--just as questions don't have a truth value. "This sentence is false," on the other hand, does belong to the class of sentences that by virtue of their form must be taken to have truth values.
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Posted Oct 20, 1999 by Lupa Mirabilis, Serious Inquisitor
Yes, but one could say the same of many mathematical theorems. Even if they don't "exist" in the sense of being applicable to the real world--and who knows, someday time travel may be part of the real world--they're still useful as intellectual questions, and they can help us understand things about the nature of logic in general.
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Posted Oct 21, 1999 by Peter Hilton
So I almost managed to make my point...
"Hello!" doesn't have a truth value because it isn't a valid assertion. Similarly, "This sentence is false!" is not a valid assertion; not because of its grammatical structure, but because of the self-reference.
The misunderstanding arises because it does in fact make sense to define "assertion" in this way.
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Posted Oct 21, 1999 by Lupa Mirabilis, Serious Inquisitor
I'm not sure I agree that it makes sense to say that a self-referential statement is ipso facto not an assertion. I really think "assertion" is defined on the basis of grammatical structure. But if you can quote me someone who says otherwise, I'll listen....
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Posted Oct 22, 1999 by Bluebottle
Essentially, no-one can prove a paradox that is one in itself, only paradoxes that exist as side-effects of the English Language, and many of the time-travel ones are side effects of stories in the English Language. Someone show me a non-language related paradox!
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Posted Oct 22, 1999 by Lupa Mirabilis, Serious Inquisitor
Time-travel paradoxes are based on language? Please explain....
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Posted Oct 25, 1999 by Bluebottle
The basis for my assertion was that all the problems involved with going back in time, marrying your mum and being your father or killing your grandfather etc is that they, as yet, don't exist in anything other than the English Language. Or if they do exist, we haven't noticed them yet. So therefore the paradox with the being your own father idea is not a practical, real-life one (as far as I know) but merely a problem for sci-fi authors to write about in their novels.
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Posted Oct 25, 1999 by Lupa Mirabilis, Serious Inquisitor
I still don't quite understand what you mean by saying that time travel paradoxes don't exist outside the English language. Surely there are time travel stories written in other languages, and surely they involve the same concepts....?
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Posted Oct 26, 1999 by Bluebottle
True, true... But they would still be language paradoxes, not real actual paradoxes. The paradox remains in the language it is written in, not in the real world of day-to-day life. I humbly apologise to all non-English time-travel paradox writing authors I inadvertently offended.
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Posted Oct 26, 1999 by Lupa Mirabilis, Serious Inquisitor
What I don't understand is your saying that the paradox is linked to the language of the story, rather than the concept of time travel itself. Surely even if we didn't have words for time travel...suppose we communicated through pictures, say, instead of words...wouldn't we still be able to see the inherent paradoxes?
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Posted Oct 26, 1999 by Lupa Mirabilis, Serious Inquisitor
Or are you simply saying that these paradoxes only exist in fiction and not in the real world? If so, please forgive me for having misunderstood you.
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Posted Oct 27, 1999 by Bluebottle
Yes, that was the message I was trying to suggest, and I apologise for putting it so clumsily. Obviously I am not writer enough to be able to write about paradoxes, with words, pictures or whatever!
So, would you agree with that idea?
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Posted Oct 27, 1999 by Lupa Mirabilis, Serious Inquisitor
Yes, I do agree for the most part that non-language-related paradoxes so far only exist in fiction. It _is_ possible in real life to set up a situation like the following: a man is being held captive and is told to make a statement; if it is true, he will be hanged, and if it is false, he will be shot. He then makes the statement: "I will be shot," and thus creates a paradox. But in real life it would be easy to get around this kind of thing by saying, for example, "All right, we'll shoot you _and_ we'll hang you"--or by boiling him to death, or a number of other things. So yes, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to set up a real-life paradox that couldn't be evaded in some way.
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Posted Oct 28, 1999 by Bluebottle
I'm glad you agree... The sad thing is, I came to this forum wanting someone to prove that it was possible to have paradoxes, but no-one seems to be here except you and I....
Do you know any good forums? My favourite of all time, "Keeping Dead Bodies In Your Home For Fun And Profit" died weeks ago...
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Posted Oct 28, 1999 by Lupa Mirabilis, Serious Inquisitor
Hmmmm...well, maybe it could be revived. I can't think of any good forums off the top of my head, but if you click around on my homepage a bit you ought to find something that I at least found interesting.
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Posted Oct 28, 1999 by Bluebottle
Okay, why not me olde mate?
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