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Similar to liar's paradox, may be "this page was intentionally left blank" paradox. Since the page contains this writing, it is not blank. So whoever wrote on t
by nyc111 8y ago
Similar to liar's paradox, may be "this page was intentionally left blank" paradox. Since the page contains this writing, it is not blank. So whoever wrote on that page "this page was intentionally left blank" was lying.
So, Aristotle holds, because the page is not "blank" and "not blank" at the same time.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoThat is an interesting parallel I hadn't thought about in that context. (It's better if we change the tense so that it's "this page is intentionally left blank", otherwise it could be trivially resolvable.) The "this sentence is false" type can be explained away, to an extent, but appealling to the fact that 'this sentence' mixes 'object language' and 'meta language' and we could say the paradox arises from self-reference (in a somewhat problematic recursion fashion). For "this page is intentionally left blank", 'this page' doesn't refer to itself, but indeed to the page, so it's doesn't seem susceptible to quite the same approach. (Though I suppose we could take 'this page' as elliptical for 'this page with this writing on it'.)