Paradox

A paradox is a logically self-contradictory

statement or a statement that runs contrary to
one's expectation.[1][2] It is a statement that, despite
apparently valid reasoning from true premises,
leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a
logically unacceptable conclusion.[3][4] A paradox
usually involves contradictory-yet-interrelated
elements that exist simultaneously and persist over
time.[5][6][7] They result in "persistent contradiction
between interdependent elements" leading to a
lasting "unity of opposites".[8]
In logic, many paradoxes exist that are known to be
invalid arguments, yet are nevertheless valuable in
promoting critical thinking,[9] while other paradoxes
have revealed errors in definitions that were
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.[10][11] Others, such as Curry's paradox, cannot
be easily resolved by making foundational changes
in a logical system.[12]

Examples outside logic include the ship of Theseus

from philosophy, a paradox that questions whether
a ship repaired over time by replacing each and all
of its wooden parts, one at a time, would remain
the same ship.[13] 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.[14]

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".[15]
Introduction
Common themes in paradoxes include self-
reference, infinite regress, circular definitions, and
confusion or equivocation between different levels
of abstraction.

Patrick Hughes outlines three laws of the

paradox:[16]

Self-reference
An example is the statement "This statement is
false",[17] 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. Yet
another example involves the question "Is the
answer to this question 'No'?"
Contradiction
"This statement is false";[18] 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 could not come true.
This contradicts itself because if the genie
grants their wish, they did not grant their wish,
and if the genie refuses to grant their wish, then
he did indeed grant their wish, therefore making
it impossible either to grant or not grant their
wish without leading to a contradiction.
Vicious circularity, or infinite regress
"This statement is false";[19] 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."

Other paradoxes involve false statements and half-

truths ("'impossible' is not in my vocabulary") or rely
on hasty assumptions (A father and his son are in a
car crash; the father is killed and the boy is rushed
to the hospital. The doctor says, "I can't operate on
this boy. He's my son." There is no paradox, the
doctor is the boy's mother.).

Paradoxes that 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 that cannot be consistently interpreted as
either true or false, because if it is known to be
false, then it can be inferred that it must be true,
and if it is known to be true, then it can be inferred
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.[10]

Thought-experiments can also yield interesting

paradoxes. The grandfather paradox, for example,
would arise if a time-traveler were to kill his own
grandfather before his mother or father had been
conceived, thereby preventing his own birth.[20] 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 that 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.
Quine's classification
W. V. O. Quine (1962) distinguished between three
classes of paradoxes:[21][22]

According to Quine's classification of paradoxes:

A veridical paradox produces a result that

appears absurd, but is demonstrated to be true
nonetheless. The paradox of Frederic's birthday
in The Pirates of Penzance establishes the
surprising fact that a twenty-one-year-old who
was born on a leap day would have had only
five birthdays. Likewise, Arrow's impossibility
theorem demonstrates difficulties in mapping
voting results to the will of the people. Monty
Hall paradox (or equivalently three prisoners
problem) demonstrates that a decision that has
an intuitive fifty–fifty chance is in fact heavily
biased towards making a decision that, given the
intuitive conclusion, the player would be unlikely
to make. In 20th-century science, Hilbert's
paradox of the Grand Hotel, Schrödinger's cat,
Wigner's friend or the Ugly duckling theorem 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 of this, often relying on a hidden
division by zero. Another example is the
inductive form of the horse paradox, which
falsely generalises from true specific statements.
Zeno's paradoxes are 'falsidical', concluding, for
 example, that a flying arrow never reaches its
target or that a speedy runner cannot catch up
to a tortoise with a small head-start. Therefore,
falsidical paradoxes can be classified as
fallacious arguments.
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 Grelling–Nelson
paradox points out genuine problems in our
understanding of the ideas of truth and
description.

A paradox can also be temporal.

A fourth kind, which may be alternatively

interpreted as a special case of the third 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 (e.g. in the Mohists,[23] the Gongsun
Longzi,[24] and in Zen[25]) and in some
paraconsistent logics. It would be mere
equivocation or a matter of degree, for example,
to both affirm and deny that "John is here" when
John is halfway through the door, but it is self-
contradictory simultaneously to affirm and deny
the event.

Ramsey's classification
Frank Ramsey drew a distinction between logical
paradoxes and semantic paradoxes, with Russell's
paradox belonging to the former category, and the
liar paradox and Grelling's paradoxes to the
latter.[26] Ramsey introduced the by-now standard
distinction between logical and semantical
contradictions. Logical contradictions involve
mathematical or logical terms like class and
number, and hence show that our logic or
mathematics is problematic. Semantical
contradictions involve, besides purely logical terms,
notions like thought, language, and symbolism,
which, according to Ramsey, are empirical (not
formal) terms. Hence these contradictions are due
to faulty ideas about thought or language, and they
properly belong to epistemology.[27]
In philosophy
A taste for paradox is central to the philosophies of
Laozi, Zeno of Elea, Zhuangzi, Heraclitus,
Bhartrhari, Meister Eckhart, Hegel, Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, and G.K. Chesterton, among many
others. Søren 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.[28]

In medicine
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
hyperactivity disorder (also known as ADHD), while
others are rare and can be dangerous as they are
not expected, such as severe agitation from a
benzodiazepine.[29]

The actions of antibodies on antigens can rarely

take paradoxical turns in certain ways. One
example is antibody-dependent enhancement
(immune enhancement) of a disease's virulence;
another is the hook effect (prozone effect), of which
there are several types. However, neither of these
problems is common, and overall, antibodies are
crucial to health, as most of the time they do their
protective job quite well.
In the smoker's paradox, cigarette smoking, despite
its proven harms, has a surprising inverse
correlation with the epidemiological incidence of
certain diseases.

See also
Absurdism – Theory that life in Philosophy
general is meaningless portal

Animalia Paradoxa – Mythical,

magical or otherwise suspect
animals mentioned in Systema
Naturae
Aporia – State of puzzlement or
expression of doubt, in
philosophy and rhetoric
Dilemma – Problem requiring a choice between
equally undesirable alternatives
Ethical dilemma – Type of dilemma in
philosophy
Fallacy – Argument that uses faulty reasoning
Formal fallacy – Faulty deductive reasoning due
to a logical flaw
Four-valued logic – Any logic with four truth
values
Impossible object – Type of optical illusion
Category:Mathematical paradoxes
List of paradoxes – List of statements that
appear to contradict themselves
Mu (negative) – Buddhist term meaning "not",
"without" or "un-" (negative prefix)
Oxymoron – Figure of speech
Paradox of tolerance – Logical paradox in
decision-making theory
Paradox of value – Contradiction between utility
and price
Paradoxes of material implication – Logical
contradictions centred on the difference
between natural language and Logic theory
Plato's beard – Example of a paradoxical
argument
Revision theory
Self-refuting idea – Idea that refutes itself
Syntactic ambiguity – Sentences with structures
permitting multiple possible interpretations
 Temporal paradox – Theoretical paradox
resulting from time travel
Twin paradox – Thought experiment in special
relativity
Zeno's paradoxes – Set of philosophical
problems

References

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External links
Cantini, Andrea (Winter Wikiquote
has
2012). "Paradoxes and
quotations
Contemporary Logic" (htt related to
Paradox.
p://plato.stanford.edu/entri
es/paradoxes-contemporar Look up
paradox in
y-logic/) . In Zalta, Edward Wiktionary,
N. (ed.). Stanford the free
dictionary.
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Wikimedia
Spade, Paul Vincent (Fall Commons
has media
2013). "Insolubles" (http://pl
related to
ato.stanford.edu/entries/ins Paradoxes.
olubles) . In Zalta, Edward
N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Paradoxes (https://curlie.org/Society/Philosoph
y/Philosophy_of_Logic/Paradoxes/) at Curlie
"Zeno and the Paradox of Motion" (http://www.m
athpages.com/rr/s3-07/3-07.htm) .
MathPages.com.
" "Logical Paradoxes" " (http://www.iep.utm.edu/p
ar-log) . Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Smith, Wendy K.; Lewis, Marianne W.;
Jarzabkowski, Paula; Langley, Ann (2017). The
 Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox (htt
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fordhb/9780198754428.001.0001/oxfordhb-978
0198754428) . ISBN 9780198754428.

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