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My initial gut response was the same - that this isn’t a paradox, but rather a proof by contradiction that one or more of the assumptions are wrong. But after t
by mokus 6y ago
My initial gut response was the same - that this isn’t a paradox, but rather a proof by contradiction that one or more of the assumptions are wrong. But after thinking about it a bit more, I don’t think there’s really that much of a difference. It’s just that some people have already learned not to apply those assumptions in this context (or by chance never stumbled into them in the first place).
Perhaps it’s fair to say that all paradoxes are “just” part of a proof by contradiction and the only difference between ones that feel truly paradoxical and those that feel obvious is something subjective about a person’s understanding of the situation. Maybe it’s down to whether someone has enough of an understanding of the conceptual landscape to be able to actually recognize some of the problematic assumptions from the start of the problem statement or not, or maybe it’s something else, but either way I’m suspecting that it’s something subjective related to a person’s state of knowledge and/or approach to organizing their own knowledge.