Monday 31 August 2015

The Ways of Paradox, by W.V. Quine

After checking my email etc., I'm going to sit down today and read the essay The Ways of Paradox by the late Harvard professor Willard Van Orman Quine (free pdf here). From a brief skim of the text, I can see he's dealing with a definition of paradox, and provides lots of useful terms, distinctions and examples. I'll be able to turn to this text whenever I need to talk about any of the following, some of which I'll copy and paste in my labels box in a minute:
definition, barber paradox, Russel's paradox, veridical paradox, falsidical paradox, fallacy, Zeno, Achilles and the tortoise, Grelling's paradox, autological adjective, heterological adjective, antinomy, Epimenides paradox, pseudomenon, Liar paradox, Berry's paradox, Tarski, subscripts, self-membership of classes, Frege, mathematics, general set theory, Gödel's proof, theorem
The text is conveniently short and, since it's a revised version of an article that originally appeared in Scientific American, it should be quite readable.

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