From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A paradox is a statement that apparently contradicts itself and yet might be true.
[1][2]
Most logical paradoxes
are known to be invalid arguments but are still valuable in promoting critical thinking.
[3]
Some paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of
mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One example is Russell's paradox, which questions whether a "list of
all lists that do not contain themselves" would include itself, and showed that attempts to found set theory on
the identification of sets with properties or predicates were flawed.
[4]
Others, such as Curry's paradox, are not
yet resolved.
Examples outside logic include the Ship of Theseus from philosophy (questioning whether a ship repaired over
time by replacing each of its wooden parts would remain the same ship). Paradoxes can also take the form of
images or other media. For example, M.C. Escher featured perspective-based paradoxes in many of his
drawings, with walls that are regarded as floors from other points of view, and staircases that appear to climb
endlessly.
[5]
In common usage, the word "paradox" often refers to statements that are ironic or unexpected, such as "the
paradox that standing is more tiring than walking".
[2]
1 Logical paradox
2 Quine's classification of paradoxes
3 Paradox in philosophy
4 Paradox in medicine
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
Common themes in paradoxes include self-reference, infinite regress, circular definitions, and confusion
between different levels of abstraction.
Patrick Hughes outlines three laws of the paradox:
[6]
Self-reference
An example is "This statement is false", a form of the liar paradox. The statement is referring to itself.
Another example of self-reference is the question of whether the barber shaves himself in the barber
Paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox
1 of 5 7/25/2014 12:15 PM
paradox. One more example would be "Is the answer to this question 'No'?"
Contradiction
"This statement is false"; the statement cannot be false and true at the same time. Another example of
contradiction is if a man talking to a genie wishes that wishes couldn't come true. This contradicts itself
because if the genie grants his wish he did not grant his wish, and if he refuses to grant his wish then he
did indeed grant his wish, therefore making it impossible to either grant or not grant his wish because his
wish contradicts itself.
Vicious circularity, or infinite regress
"This statement is false"; if the statement is true, then the statement is false, thereby making the statement
true. Another example of vicious circularity is the following group of statements:
"The following sentence is true."
"The previous sentence is false."
"What happens when Pinocchio says, 'My nose will grow now'?"
Other paradoxes involve false statements ("impossible is not a word in my vocabulary", a simple paradox) or
half-truths and the resulting biased assumptions. This form is common in howlers.
For example, consider a situation in which a father and his son are driving down the road. The car crashes into a
tree and the father is killed. The boy is rushed to the nearest hospital where he is prepared for emergency
surgery. On entering the surgery suite, the surgeon says, "I can't operate on this boy. He's my son."
The apparent paradox is caused by a hasty generalization, for if the surgeon is the boy's father, the statement
cannot be true. The paradox is resolved if it is revealed that the surgeon is a woman the boy's mother.
Paradoxes which are not based on a hidden error generally occur at the fringes of context or language, and
require extending the context or language in order to lose their paradoxical quality. Paradoxes that arise from
apparently intelligible uses of language are often of interest to logicians and philosophers. "This sentence is
false" is an example of the well-known liar paradox: it is a sentence which cannot be consistently interpreted as
either true or false, because if it is known to be false, then it is known that it must be true, and if it is known to
be true, then it is known that it must be false. Russell's paradox, which shows that the notion of the set of all
those sets that do not contain themselves leads to a contradiction, was instrumental in the development of
modern logic and set theory.
Thought experiments can also yield interesting paradoxes. The grandfather paradox, for example, would arise if
a time traveller were to kill his own grandfather before his mother or father had been conceived, thereby
preventing his own birth. This is a specific example of the more general observation of the butterfly effect, or
that a time-traveller's interaction with the past however slight would entail making changes that would, in
turn, change the future in which the time-travel was yet to occur, and would thus change the circumstances of
the time-travel itself.
Often a seemingly paradoxical conclusion arises from an inconsistent or inherently contradictory definition of
the initial premise. In the case of that apparent paradox of a time traveler killing his own grandfather it is the
inconsistency of defining the past to which he returns as being somehow different from the one which leads up
to the future from which he begins his trip but also insisting that he must have come to that past from the same
future as the one that it leads up to.
Paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox
2 of 5 7/25/2014 12:15 PM
W. V. Quine (1962) distinguished between three classes of paradoxes:
A veridical paradox produces a result that appears absurd but is demonstrated to be true nevertheless.
Thus, the paradox of Frederic's birthday in The Pirates of Penzance establishes the surprising fact that a
twenty-one-year-old would have had only five birthdays, if he had been born on a leap day. Likewise,
Arrow's impossibility theorem demonstrates difficulties in mapping voting results to the will of the
people. The Monty Hall paradox demonstrates that a decision which has an intuitive 50-50 chance in fact
is heavily biased towards making a decision which, given the intuitive conclusion, the player would be
unlikely to make. In 20th century science, Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel and Schrdinger's cat are
famously vivid examples of a theory being taken to a logical but paradoxical end.
A falsidical paradox establishes a result that not only appears false but actually is false, due to a fallacy
in the demonstration. The various invalid mathematical proofs (e.g., that 1 =2) are classic examples,
generally relying on a hidden division by zero. Another example is the inductive form of the horse
paradox, which falsely generalizes from true specific statements.
A paradox that is in neither class may be an antinomy, which reaches a self-contradictory result by
properly applying accepted ways of reasoning. For example, the GrellingNelson paradox points out
genuine problems in our understanding of the ideas of truth and description.
A fourth kind has sometimes been described since Quine's work.
A paradox that is both true and false at the same time and in the same sense is called a dialetheia. In
Western logics it is often assumed, following Aristotle, that no dialetheia exist, but they are sometimes
accepted in Eastern traditions and in paraconsistent logics. It would be mere equivocation or a matter of
degree, for example, to both affirm and deny that "J ohn is here" when J ohn is halfway through the door
but it is self-contradictory to simultaneously affirm and deny the event in some sense.
A taste for paradox is central to the philosophies of Laozi, Heraclitus, Meister Eckhart, Hegel, Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, and G.K. Chesterton, among many others. Sren Kierkegaard, for example, writes, in the
Philosophical Fragments, that
But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker
without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow. But the ultimate
potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate
passion of the understanding to will the collision, although in one way or another the collision must
become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something
that thought itself cannot think.
[7]
Paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox
3 of 5 7/25/2014 12:15 PM
A paradoxical reaction to a drug is the opposite of what one would expect, such as becoming agitated by a
sedative or sedated by a stimulant. Some are common and are used regularly in medicine, such as the use of
stimulants such as Adderall and Ritalin in the treatment of attention deficit disorder, while others are rare and
can be dangerous as they are not expected, such as severe agitation from a benzodiazepine.
Animalia Paradoxa
Antinomy
Contradiction
Dilemma
Dogma
Ethical dilemma
Formal fallacy
Four-valued logic
Impossible object
Irony
List of paradoxes
Mu (negative)
Oxymoron
Paradox of value
Paradoxes of material
implication
Plato's beard
Self-refuting ideas
Syntactic ambiguity
Temporal paradox
Twin paradox
Zeno's paradoxes
^ "Paradox" (http://www.merriam-webster.com
/dictionary/paradox). Merriam-Webster. Retrieved
2013-08-30.
1.
^
a

b
"Paradox" (http://www.thefreedictionary.com
/paradox). Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and
Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2013-01-22.
2.
^ Eliason, J ames L. (MarchApril 1996). "Using
Paradoxes to Teach Critical Thinking in Science"
(http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles
/9604072434/using-paradoxes-teach-critical-thinking-
science). Journal of College Science Teaching 15 (5):
34144. (subscription required (help)).
3.
^ Crossley, J .N.; Ash, C.J .; Brickhill, C.J .; Stillwell,
J .C.; Williams, N.H. (1972). What is mathematical
logic?. London-Oxford-New York: Oxford University
Press. pp. 5960. ISBN 0-19-888087-1.
Zbl 0251.02001 (http://www.zentralblatt-math.org
/zmath/en/search/?format=complete&
q=an:0251.02001).
4.
^ Skomorowska, Amira (ed.). "The Mathematical Art
of M.C. Escher" (http://aminotes.tumblr.com
/post/653017235/the-mathematical-art-of-m-c-escher-
for-me-it). Lapidarium notes. Retrieved 2013-01-22.
5.
^ Hughes, Patrick; Brecht, George (1975). Vicious
Circles and Infinity - A Panoply of Paradoxes.
Garden City, New York: Doubleday. pp. 18.
ISBN 0-385-09917-7. LCCN 74-17611
(http://lccn.loc.gov/74-17611) Check | l ccn= value
(help).
6.
^ Kierkegaard, Sren (1985). Hong, Howard V.;
Hong, Edna H., eds. Philosophical Fragments
(http://books.google.com
/books?id=kuMoXUAaEr0C&pg=PA37). Princeton
University Press. p. 37. ISBN 9780691020365.
7.
Cantini, Andrea (Winter 2012). "Paradoxes and Contemporary Logic" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries
Paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox
4 of 5 7/25/2014 12:15 PM
Wikiquote has a collection
of quotations related to:
Paradox
Look up paradox in
Wiktionary, the free
dictionary.
Wikimedia Commons has
media related to Paradoxes.
/paradoxes-contemporary-logic/). In Zalta, Edward N. Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Spade, Paul Vincent (Fall 2013). "Insolubles"
(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/insolubles). In Zalta, Edward N.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Paradoxes (http://www.dmoz.org/Society/Philosophy
/Philosophy_of_Logic/Paradoxes/) at DMOZ
"Zeno and the Paradox of Motion" (http://www.mathpages.com
/rr/s3-07/3-07.htm) at MathPages.com.
"Logical Paradoxes" (http://www.iep.utm.edu/par-log) entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paradox&oldid=616332418"
Categories: Paradoxes Philosophical logic Concepts in logic
This page was last modified on 10 J uly 2014 at 06:25.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may
apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipediais a registered
trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox
5 of 5 7/25/2014 12:15 PM