Thursday, August 11, 2011

This statement is false. Does that make it a paradox?

In philosophy and logic, the liar paradox, known to the ancients as the pseudomenon, encompes paradoxical statements such as "This sentence is false." or "The next sentence is false. The previous sentence is true." These statements are paradoxical because there is no way to ign them a consistent clical binary truth value. If "This sentence is false" is true, then it is true and what it says is the case; but what it says is that it is false, hence it is false. On the other hand, if it is false, then what it says is not the case; thus, since it says that it is false, it must be true.

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