Paradoxes

Infinity

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I discussed this topic previously, but without coming to a definite conclusion. Here I will give what I think is the correct explanation.

In his book Infinity, Causation, and Paradox, Alexander Pruss argues for what he calls “causal finitism,” or the principle that nothing can be affected by infinitely many causes:

In this volume, I will present a number of paradoxes of infinity, some old like Thomson’s Lamp and some new, and offer a unified metaphysical response to all of them by means of the hypothesis of causal finitism, which roughly says that nothing can be affected by infinitely many causes. In particular, Thomson’s Lamp story is ruled out since the final state of the lamp would be affected by infinitely many switch togglings. And in addition to arguing for the hypothesis as the best unified resolution to the paradoxes I shall offer some direct arguments against infinite regresses.

Thomson’s Lamp, if the reader is not familiar with it, is the question of what happens to a lamp if you switch it on and off an infinite number of times in a finite interval, doubling your velocity after each switch. At the end of the interval, is it on or off?

I think Pruss’s account is roughly speaking correct. I say “roughly speaking” because I would be hesitant to claim that nothing can be “affected” by infinitely many causes. Rather I would say that nothing is one effect simultaneously of infinitely many causes, and this is true for the same reason that there cannot be an infinite causal regress. That is, an infinite causal regress removes the notion of cause by removing the possibility of explanation, which is an intrinsic part of the idea of a cause. Similarly, it is impossible to explain anything using an infinite number of causes, because that infinity as such cannot be comprehended, and thus cannot be used to understand the thing which is the supposed effect. And since the infinity cannot explain the thing, neither can it be the cause of the thing.

What does this imply about the sorts of questions that were raised in my previous discussion, as for example about an infinite past or an infinite future, or a spatially infinite universe?

I presented an argument there, without necessarily claiming it to be correct, that such things are impossible precisely because they seem to imply an infinite causal regress. If there an infinite number of stars in the universe, for example, there seems to be an infinite regress of material causes: the universe seems to be composed of this local portion plus the rest, with the rest composed in a similar way, ad infinitum.

Unfortunately, there is an error in this argument against a spatially infinite world, and in similar arguments against a temporally infinite world, whether past or future. This can be seen in my response to Bertrand Russell when I discuss the material causes of water. Even if it is possible to break every portion of water down into smaller portions, it does not follow that this is an infinite sequence of material causes, or that it helps to explain water. In a similar way, even if the universe can be broken down into an infinite number of pieces in the above way, it does not follow that the universe has an infinite number of material causes: rather, this breakdown fails to explain, and fails to give causes at all.

St. Thomas gives a different argument against an infinite multitude, roughly speaking that it would lack a formal cause:

This, however, is impossible; since every kind of multitude must belong to a species of multitude. Now the species of multitude are to be reckoned by the species of numbers. But no species of number is infinite; for every number is multitude measured by one. Hence it is impossible for there to be an actually infinite multitude, either absolute or accidental.

By this argument, it would be impossible for there to be “an infinite number of stars” because the collection would lack “a species of multitude.” Unfortunately there is a problem with this argument as well, namely that it presupposes that the number is inherently fixed before it is considered by human beings. In reality, counting depends on someone who counts and a method they use for counting; to talk about the “number of stars” is a choice to break down the world in that particular way. There are other ways to think of it, as for example when we use the word “universe”, we count everything at once as a unit.

According to my account here, are some sorts of infinity actually impossible? Yes, namely those which demand an infinite sequence of explanation, or which demand an infinite number of things in order to explain something. Thus for example consider this story from Pruss about shuffling an infinite deck of cards:

Suppose I have an infinitely deep deck of cards, numbered with the positive integers. Can I shuffle it?

Given an infinite past, here is a procedure: n days ago, I perfectly fairly shuffle the top n cards in the deck.

This procedure is impossible because it makes the current state of the deck the direct effect of what I did n days ago, for all n. And the effect is a paradox: it is mathematically impossible for the integers to be randomly shuffled, because any series of integers will be biased towards lower numbers. Note that the existence of an infinite past is not the problem so much as assuming that one could have carried out such a procedure during an infinite past; in reality, if there was an infinite past, its contents are equally “infinite,” that is, they do not have such a definable, definite, “finite” relationship with the present.

And Fire by Fire

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Superstitious Nonsense asks about the last post:

So the answer here is that -some- of the form is present in the mind, but always an insufficient amount or accuracy that the knowledge will not be “physical”? You seem to be implying the part of the form that involves us in the self-reference paradox is precisely the part of the form that gives objects their separate, “physical” character. Is this fair? Certainly, knowing progressively more about an object does not imply the mental copy is becoming closer and closer to having a discrete physicality.

I’m not sure this is the best way to think about it. The self-reference paradox arises because we are trying to copy ourselves into ourselves, and thus we are adding something into ourselves, making the copy incomplete. The problem is not that there is some particular “part of the form” that we cannot copy, but that it is in principle impossible to copy it perfectly. This is different from saying that there is some specific “part” that cannot be copied.

Consider what happens when we make “non-physical” copies of something without involving a mind. Consider the image of a gold coin. There are certain relationships common to the image and to a gold coin in the physical world. So you could say we have a physical gold coin, and a non-physical one.

But wait. If the image of the coin is on paper, isn’t that a physical object? Or if the image is on your computer screen, isn’t your screen a physical object? And the image is just the colors on the screen, which are apparently just as “physical” (or non-physical) as the color of the actual coin. So why we would say that “this is not a physical coin?”

Again, as in the last post, the obvious answer is that the image is not made out of gold, while the physical coin is. But why not? Is it that the image is not accurate enough? If we made it more accurate, would it be made out of gold, or become closer to being made out of gold? Obviously not. This is like noting that a mental copy does not become closer and closer to being a physical one.

In a sense it is true that the reason the image of the coin is not physical is that it is not accurate enough. But that is because it cannot be accurate enough: the fact that it is an image positively excludes the copying of certain relationships. Some aspects can be copied, but others cannot be copied at all, as long as it is an image. On the other hand, you can look at this from the opposite direction: if you did copy those aspects, the image would no longer be an image, but a physical coin.

As a similar example, consider the copying of a colored scene into black and white. We can copy some aspects of the scene by using various shades of gray, but we cannot copy every aspect of the scene. There are simply not enough differences in a black and white image to reflect every aspect of a colored scene. The black and white image, as you make it more accurate, does not become closer to being colored, but this is simply because there are aspects of the colored scene that you never copy. If you do insist on copying those aspects, you will indeed make the black and white image into a colored image, and thus it will no longer be black and white.

The situation becomes significantly more complicated when we talk about a mind. In one way, there is an important similarity. When we say that the copy in the mind is “not physical,” that simply means that it is a copy in the mind, just as when we say that the image of the coin is not physical, it means that it is an image, made out of the stuff that images are made of. But just as the image is physical anyway, in another sense, so it is perfectly possible that the mind is physical in a similar sense. However, this is where things begin to become confusing.

Elsewhere, I discussed Aristotle’s argument that the mind is immaterial. Considering the cases above, we could put his argument in this way: the human brain is a limited physical object. So as long as the brain remains a brain, there are simply not enough potential differences in it to model all possible differences in the world, just as you cannot completely model a colored scene using black and white. But anything at all can be understood. Therefore we cannot be understanding by using the brain.

I have claimed myself that anything that can be, can be understood. But this needs to be understood generically, rather than as claiming that it is possible to understand reality in every detail simultaneously. The self-reference paradox shows that it is impossible in principle for a knower that copies forms into itself to understand itself in every aspect at once. But even apart from this, it is very obvious that we as human beings cannot understand every aspect of reality at once. This does not even need to be argued: you cannot even keep everything in mind at once, let alone understand every detail of everything. This directly suggests a problem with Aristotle’s argument: if being able to know all things suggests that the mind is immaterial, the obvious fact that we cannot know all things suggests that it is not.

Nonetheless, let us see what happens if we advance the argument on Aristotle’s behalf. Admittedly, we cannot understand everything at once. But in the case of the colored scene, there are aspects that cannot be copied at all into the black and white copy. And in the case of the physical coin, there are aspects that cannot be copied at all into the image. So if we are copying things into the brain, doesn’t that mean that there should be aspects of reality that cannot be copied at all into the mind? But this is false, since it would not only mean that we can’t understand everything, but it would also mean that there would be things that we cannot think about at all, and if it is so, then it is not so, because in that case we are right now talking about things that we supposedly cannot talk about.

Copying into the mind is certainly different from copying into a black and white scene or copying into a picture, and this does get at one of the differences. But the difference here is that the method of copying in the case of the mind is flexible, while the method of copying in the case of the pictures is rigid. In other words, we have a pre-defined method of copying in the case of the pictures that, from the beginning, only allows certain aspects to be copied. In the case of the mind, we determine the method differently from case to case, depending on our particular situation and the thing being copied. The result is that there is no particular aspect of things that cannot be copied, but you cannot copy every aspect at once.

In answer to the original question, then, the reason that the “mental copy” always remains mental is that you never violate the constraints of the mind, just as a black and white copy never violates the constraints of being black and white. But if you did violate the constraints of the black and white copy by copying every aspect of the scene, the image would become colored. And similarly, if you did violate the constraints of the mind in order to copy every aspect of reality, your mind would cease to be, and it would instead become the thing itself. But there is no particular aspect of “physicality” that you fail to copy: rather, you just ensure that one way or another you do not violate the constraints of the mind that you have.

Unfortunately, the explanation here for why the mind can copy any particular aspect of reality, although not every aspect at once, is rather vague. Perhaps a clearer explanation is possible? In fact, someone could use the vagueness to argue for Aristotle’s position and against mine. Perhaps my account is vague because it is wrong, and there is actually no way for a physical object to receive copied forms in this way.

Open Future

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Let’s return for a moment to the question at the end of this post. I asked, “What happens if the future is indeterminate? Would not the eternalist position necessarily differ from the presentist one, in that case?”

Why necessarily different? The argument in that post was that eternalism and presentism are different descriptions of the same thing, and that we see the sameness by noting the sameness of relations between the elements of the description. But if the future is open, as Aristotle supposed, it is hard to see how we can maintain this. Aristotle says that the present is open to either having the sea battle tomorrow or not having it. With an eternalist view, the sea battle is “already there” or it is not. So in Aristotle’s view, the present has an open relationship to both possibilities. But the eternalist view seems to be truly open only to the possibility that will actually happen. We no longer have the same set of relationships.

Notice the problem. When I attempted to equate eternalism and presentism, I implicitly assumed that determinism is true. There were only three states of the universe, beginning, middle, and end. If determinism is false, things are different. There might be beginning, middle, and two potential ends. Perhaps there is a sea battle in one of the potential ends, and no sea battle in the other.

This suggests a solution to our conundrum, however. Even the presentist description in that post was inconsistent with an open future. If there is only one possible end, the future is not open, even if we insist that the unique possible end “currently doesn’t exist.” The problem then was not eternalism as such, but the fact that we started out with a determinist description of the universe. This strongly suggests that if my argument about eternalism and presentism was correct, we should be able to formulate eternalist and presentist descriptions of an open future which will be equivalent. But both will need to be different from the fixed “beginning-middle-end” described in that post.

We can simply take Aristotle’s account as the account of presentism with an open future. How can we give an eternalist account of the same thing? The basic requirement will be that the relationship between the present and the future needs to be the same in both accounts. Now in Aristotle’s account, the present has the same relationship to two different possibilities: both of them are equally possible. So to get a corresponding eternalist account, we need the present to be equally related to two futures that correspond to the two possiblities in the presentist account. I do not say “two possible futures,” but “two futures,” precisely because the account is eternalist.

The careful reader will already understand the account from the above, but let us be more explicit. The eternalist account that corresponds to the presentist account with an open future has multiple timelines, all of which “exist”, in the eternalist sense. The reader will no doubt be familiar with the idea of multiple timelines, at least from time travel fiction. In a similar way, the eternalist reworking of Aristotle’s position is that there is a timeline where the sea battle takes place, and another timeline where the sea battle does not take place. In this view, both of them “actually” happen. But even in this view, an observer in the middle location will have to say, “I do not, and cannot, know whether the sea battle will take place or not,” just as in Aristotle’s view. For the observer cannot traverse both timelines at once. From his point of view, he will take only one, but since his relationship to the two possibilities (or actualities) is the same, it is indeterminate which one it will be.

Even if one cannot prove my account of equivalence to be wrong, the reader may worry. Time travel fiction frequently seems incoherent, and this suggests that any view with multiple timelines may also be incoherent. But this potential incoherence supports the equivalence, rather than subtracting from it. For as we noted in the post on Aristotle, there is a definite appearance of incoherence in his position. It is not even clear how his view is logically possible. So it would not be surprising, but quite natural, if views which are intended to be equivalent to his position are also not clearly coherent. Nonetheless, the multiple timelines description does have some logical advantage over Aristotle’s position, in the sense that “the sea battle will take place in timeline A” does not even appear to contradict “the sea battle will not take place in timeline B.”

Form and Reality II

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This is a followup to this earlier post, but will use a number of other threads to get a fuller understanding of the matter. Rather than presenting this in the form of a single essay, I will present it as a number of distinct theses, many of which have already been argued or suggested in various forms elsewhere on the blog.

(1) Everything that exists or can exist has or could have some relationship with the mind: relationship is in fact intrinsic to the nature of existence.

This was argued here, with related remarks in several recent posts. In a sense the claim is not only true but obviously so. You are the one who says or can say “this exists,” and you could not say or understand it unless the thing had or could have some relationship with your mind.

Perhaps this seems a bit unfair to reality, as though the limits of reality were being set by the limits of the thinker. What if there were a limited being that could only think of some things, but other things could exist that it could not think about? It is easy to see that in this situation the limited being does not have the concept of “everything,” and so can neither affirm nor deny (1). It is not that it would affirm it but be mistaken. It would simply never think of it.

Someone could insist: I myself am limited. It might be that there are better thinkers in the world that can think about things I could never conceive of. But again, if you have concept of “everything,” then you just thought of those things: they are the things that those thinkers would think about. So you just thought about them too, and brought them into relationship with yourself.

Thus, anyone who actually has the idea of “everything,” and thinks about the matter clearly, will agree with (1).

(2) Nothing can be true which could not in principle (in some sense of “in principle”) in some way be said to be true.

Thesis (1) can be taken as saying that anything that can be, can also be understood, at least in some way; and thesis (2) can be taken as saying that anything that can be understood, can also be said, at least in some way.

Since language is conventional, this does not need much of an argument. If I think that something exists, and I don’t have a name for it, I can make up a name. If I think that one thing is another thing, but don’t have words for these things, I can make up words for them. Even if I am not quite sure what I am thinking, I can say, “I have a thought in my mind but don’t quite have the words for it,” and in some way I have already put it into words.

One particular objection to the thesis might be made from self-reference paradoxes. The player in the Liar Game cannot correctly say whether the third statement is true or false, even though it is in fact true or false. But note two things: first, he cannot do this while he is playing, but once the game is over, he can explicitly and correctly say whether it was true or false. Second, even while playing, he can say, “the third statement has a truth value,” and in this way he speaks of its truth in a generic way. This is in part why I added the hedges to (2), “at least in some way”, and “in principle.”

(3) Things do not have hidden essences. That is, they may have essences, but those essences can be explained in words.

This follows in a straightforward way from (1) and (2). The essence of a thing is just “what it is,” or perhaps, “what it most truly is.” The question “what is this thing?” is formed with words, and it is evident that anyone who answers the question, will answer the question by using words.

Now someone might object that the essence of a thing might be hidden because perhaps in some cases the question does not have an answer. But then it would not be true that it has an essence but is hidden: rather, it would be false that it has an essence. Similarly, if the question “where is this thing,” does not have any answer, it does not mean the thing is in a hidden place, but that the thing is not in a place at all.

Another objection might be that an essence might be hidden because the answer to the question exists, but cannot be known. A discussion of this would depend on what is meant by “can be known” and “cannot be known” in this context. That is, if the objector is merely saying that we do not know such things infallibly, including the answer to the question, “what is this?”, then I agree, but would add that (3) does not speak to this point one way or another. But if it is meant that “cannot be known” means that there is something there, the “thing in itself,” which in no way can be known or expressed in words, this would be the Kantian error. This is indeed contrary to (3), and implicitly to (1) or (2) or both, but it is also false.

People might also think that the essence cannot be known because they notice that the question “what is this?” can have many legitimate answers, and suppose that one of these, and only one, must be really and truly true, but think that we have no way to find out which one it is. While there are certainly cases where an apparent answer to the question is not a true answer, the main response here is that if both answers are true, both answers are true: there does not need to be a deeper but hidden level where one is true and the other false. There may however be a deeper level which speaks to other matters and possibly explains both answers. Thus I said in the post linked above that the discussion was not limited to “how many,” but would apply in some way to every question about the being of things.

(4) Reductionism, as it is commonly understood, is false.

I have argued this in various places, but more recently and in particular here and here. It is not just one-sided to say for example that the universe and everything in it is just a multitude of particles. It is false, because it takes one of several truths, and says that one is “really” true and that the other is “really” false.

(5) Anti-reductionism, as it is commonly understood, is false.

This follows from the same arguments. Anti-reductionism, as for example the sort advocated by Alexander Pruss, takes the opposite side of the above argument, saying that certain things are “really” one and in no way many. And this is also false.

(6) Form makes a thing to be what it is, and makes it to be one thing.

This is largely a question of definition. It is what is meant by form in this context.

Someone might object that perhaps there is nothing that makes a thing what it is, or there is nothing that makes it one thing. But if it is what it is of itself, or if it is one of itself, then by this definition it is its own form, and we do not necessarily have an issue with that.

Again, someone might say that the definition conflates two potentially distinct things. Perhaps one thing makes a thing what it is, and another thing makes it one thing. But this is not possible because of the convertibility of being and unity: to be a thing at all, is to be one thing.

(7) Form is what is in common between the mind and the thing it understands, and is the reason the mind understands at all.

This is very distinctly not a question of definition. This needs to be proved from (6), along with what we know about understanding.

It is not so strange to think that you would need to have something in common with a thing in order to understand it. Thus Aristotle presents the words of Empedocles:

For ’tis by Earth we see Earth, by Water Water,

By Ether Ether divine, by Fire destructive Fire,

By Love Love, and Hate by cruel Hate.

On the other hand, there is also obviously something wrong with this. I don’t need to be a tree in order to see or think about a tree, and it is not terribly obvious that there is even anything in common between us. In fact, one of Hilary Lawson’s arguments for his anti-realist position is that there frequently seems to be nothing in common between causes and effects, and that therefore there may be (or certainly will be) nothing in common between our minds and reality, and thus we cannot ultimately know anything. Thus he says in Chapter 2 of his book on closure:

For a system of closure to provide a means of intervention in openness and thus to function as a closure machine, it requires a means of converting the flux of openness into an array of particularities. This initial layer of closure will be identified as ‘preliminary closure’. As with closure generally, preliminary closure consists in the realisation of particularity as a consequence of holding that which is different as the same. This is achieved through the realisation of material in response to openness. The most minimal example of a system of closure consists of a single preliminary closure. Such a system requires two discrete states, or at least states that can be held as if they were discrete. It is not difficult to provide mechanical examples of such systems which allow for a single preliminary closure. A mousetrap for example, can be regarded as having two discrete states: it is either set, it is ready, or it has sprung, it has gone off. Many different causes may have led to it being in one state or another: it may have been sprung by a mouse, but it could also have been knocked by someone or something, or someone could have deliberately set it off. In the context of the mechanism all of these variations are of no consequence, it is either set or it has sprung. The diversity of the immediate environment is thereby reduced to single state and its absence: it is either set or it is not set. Any mechanical arrangement that enables a system to alternate between two or more discrete states is thereby capable of providing the basis for preliminary closure. For example, a bell or a gate could function as the basis for preliminary closure. The bell can either ring or not ring, the gate can be closed or not closed. The bell may ring as the result of the wind, or a person or animal shaking it, but the cause of the response is in the context of system of no consequence. The bell either rings or it doesn’t. Similarly, the gate may be in one state or another because it has been deliberately moved, or because something or someone has dislodged it accidentally, but these variations are not relevant in the context of the state of system, which in this case is the position of the gate. In either case the cause of the bell ringing or the gate closing is infinitely varied, but in the context of the system the variety of inputs is not accessible to the system and thus of no consequence.

A useful way to think about Lawson is that he is in some way a disciple of Heraclitus. Thus closure is “holding that which is different as the same,” but in reality nothing is ever the same because everything is in flux. In the context of this passage, the mousetrap is either set or sprung, and so it divides the world into two states, the “set” state and the “sprung” state. But the universes with the set mousetrap have nothing in common with one another besides the set mousetrap, and the universes with the sprung mousetrap have nothing in common with one another besides the sprung mousetrap.

We can see how this could lead to the conclusion that knowledge is impossible. Sight divides parts of the world up with various colors. Leaves are green, the sky is blue, the keyboard I am using is black. But if I look at two different green things, or two different blue things, they may have nothing in common besides the fact that they affected my sight in a similar way. The sky and a blue couch are blue for very different reasons. We discussed this particular point elsewhere, but the general concern would be that we have no reason to think there is anything in common between our mind and the world, and some reason to think there must be something in common in order for us to understand anything.

Fortunately, the solution can be found right in the examples which supposedly suggest that there is nothing in common between the mind and the world. Consider the mousetrap. Do the universes with the set mousetrap have something in common? Yes, they have the set mousetrap in common. But Lawson does not deny this. His concern is that they have nothing else in common. But they do have something else in common: they have the same relationship to the mousetrap, different from the relationship that the universes with the sprung mousetrap have to their mousetrap. What about the mousetrap itself? Do those universes have something in common with the mousetrap? If we consider the relationship between the mousetrap and the universe as a kind of single thing with two ends, then they do, although they share in it from different ends, just as a father and son have a relationship in common (in this particular sense.) The same things will be true in the case of sensible qualities. “Blue” may divide up surface reflectance properties in a somewhat arbitrary way, but it does divide them into things that have something in common, namely their relationship with the sense of sight.

Or consider the same thing with a picture. Does the picture have anything in common with the thing it represents? Since a picture is meant to actually look similar to the eye to the object pictured, it may have certain shapes in common, the straightness of certain lines, and so on. It may have some colors in common. This kind of literal commonness might have suggested to Empedocles that we should know “earth by earth,” but one difference is that a picture and the object look alike to the eye, but an idea is not something that the mind looks at, and which happens to look like a thing: rather the idea is what the mind uses in order to look at a thing at all.

Thus a better comparison would be between the the thing seen and the image in the eye or the activity of the visual cortex. It is easy enough to see by looking that the image in a person’s eye bears some resemblance to the thing seen, even the sort of resemblance that a picture has. In a vaguer way, something similar turns out to be true even in the visual cortex:

V1 has a very well-defined map of the spatial information in vision. For example, in humans, the upper bank of the calcarine sulcus responds strongly to the lower half of visual field (below the center), and the lower bank of the calcarine to the upper half of visual field. In concept, this retinotopic mapping is a transformation of the visual image from retina to V1. The correspondence between a given location in V1 and in the subjective visual field is very precise: even the blind spots are mapped into V1. In terms of evolution, this correspondence is very basic and found in most animals that possess a V1. In humans and animals with a fovea in the retina, a large portion of V1 is mapped to the small, central portion of visual field, a phenomenon known as cortical magnification. Perhaps for the purpose of accurate spatial encoding, neurons in V1 have the smallest receptive field size of any visual cortex microscopic regions.

However, as I said, this is in a much vaguer way. In particular, it is not so much an image which is in common, but certain spatial relationships. If we go back to the idea of the mousetrap, this is entirely unsurprising. Causes and effects will always have something in common, and always in this particular way, namely with a commonality of relationship, because causes and effects, as such, are defined by their relationship to each other.

How does all this bear on our thesis (7)? Consider the color blue, and the question, “what is it to be blue?” What is the essence of blue? We could answer this in at least two different ways:

  1. To be blue is to have certain reflectance properties.
  2. To be blue is to be the sort of thing that looks blue.

But in the way intended, these are one and the same thing. A thing looks blue if it has those properties, and it has those properties if it looks blue. Now someone might say that this is a direct refutation of our thesis, since the visual cortex presumably does not look blue or have those properties when you look at something blue. But this is like Lawson’s claim that the universe has nothing in common with the sprung mousetrap. It does have something in common, if you look at the relationship from the other end. The same thing happens when we consider the meaning of “certain reflectance properties,” and “the sort of thing that looks blue.” We are actually talking about the properties that make a thing look blue, so both definitions are relative to the sense of sight. And this means that sight has something relative in common with them, and the relation it has in common is the very one that defines the nature of blue. As this is what we mean by form (thesis 6), the form of blue must be present in the sense of sight in order to see something blue.

In fact, it followed directly from thesis (1) that the nature of blue would need to include something relative. And it followed from (2) and (3) that the very same nature would turn out to be present in our senses, thoughts, and words.

The same argument applies to the mind as to the senses. I will draw additional conclusions in a later post, and in particular, show the relevance of theses (4) and (5) to the rest.

Self Reference Paradox Summarized

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Hilary Lawson is right to connect the issue of the completeness and consistency of truth with paradoxes of self-reference.

As a kind of summary, consider this story:

It was a dark and stormy night,
and all the Cub Scouts where huddled around their campfire.
One scout looked up to the Scout Master and said:
“Tell us a story.”
And the story went like this:

It was a dark and stormy night,
and all the Cub Scouts where huddled around their campfire.
One scout looked up to the Scout Master and said:
“Tell us a story.”
And the story went like this:

It was a dark and stormy night,
and all the Cub Scouts where huddled around their campfire.
One scout looked up to the Scout Master and said:
“Tell us a story.”
And the story went like this:

It was a dark and stormy night,
and all the Cub Scouts where huddled around their campfire.
One scout looked up to the Scout Master and said:
“Tell us a story.”
And the story went like this:
etc.

In this form, the story obviously exists, but in its implied form, the story cannot be told, because for the story to be “told” is for it to be completed, and it is impossible for it be completed, since it will not be complete until it contains itself, and this cannot happen.

Consider a similar example. You sit in a room at a desk, and decide to draw a picture of the room. You draw the walls. Then you draw yourself and your desk. But then you realize, “there is also a picture in the room. I need to draw the picture.” You draw the picture itself as a tiny image within the image of your desktop, and add tiny details: the walls of the room, your desk and yourself.

Of course, you then realize that your artwork can never be complete, in exactly the same way that the story above cannot be complete.

There is essentially the same problem in these situations as in all the situations we have described which involve self-reference: the paradox of the liar, the liar game, the impossibility of detailed future prediction, the list of all true statements, Gödel’s theorem, and so on.

In two of the above posts, namely on future prediction and Gödel’s theorem, there are discussions of James Chastek’s attempts to use the issue of self-reference to prove that the human mind is not a “mechanism.” I noted in those places that such supposed proofs fail, and at this point it is easy to see that they will fail in general, if they depend on such reasoning. What is possible or impossible here has nothing to do with such things, and everything to do with self-reference. You cannot have a mirror and a camera so perfect that you can get an actually infinite series of images by taking a picture of the mirror with the camera, but there is nothing about such a situation that could not be captured by an image outside the situation, just as a man outside the room could draw everything in the room, including the picture and its details. This does not show that a man outside the room has a superior drawing ability compared with the man in the room. The ability of someone else to say whether the third statement in the liar game is true or false does not prove that the other person does not have a “merely human” mind (analogous to a mere mechanism), despite the fact that you yourself cannot say whether it is true or false.

There is a grain of truth in Chastek’s argument, however. It does follow that if someone says that reality as a whole is a formal system, and adds that we can know what that system is, their position would be absurd, since if we knew such a system we could indeed derive a specific arithmetical truth, namely one that we could state in detail, which would be unprovable from the system, namely from reality, but nonetheless proved to be true by us. And this is logically impossible, since we are a part of reality.

At this point one might be tempted to say, “At this point we have fully understood the situation. So all of these paradoxes and so on don’t prevent us from understanding reality perfectly, even if that was the original appearance.”

But this is similar to one of two things.

First, a man can stand outside the room and draw a picture of everything in it, including the picture, and say, “Behold. A picture of the room and everything in it.” Yes, as long as you are not in the room. But if the room is all of reality, you cannot get outside it, and so you cannot draw such a picture.

Second, the man in the room can draw the room, the desk and himself, and draw a smudge on the center of the picture of the desk, and say, “Behold. A smudged drawing of the room and everything in it, including the drawing.” But one only imagines a picture of the drawing underneath the smudge: there is actually no such drawing in the picture of the room, nor can there be.

In the same way, we can fully understand some local situation, from outside that situation, or we can have a smudged understanding of the whole situation, but there cannot be any detailed understanding of the whole situation underneath the smudge.

I noted that I disagreed with Lawson’s attempt to resolve the question of truth. I did not go into detail, and I will not, as the book is very long and an adequate discussion would be much longer than I am willing to attempt, at least at this time, but I will give some general remarks. He sees, correctly, that there are problems both with saying that “truth exists” and that “truth does not exist,” taken according to the usual concept of truth, but in the end his position amounts to saying that the denial of truth is truer than the affirmation of truth. This seems absurd, and it is, but not quite so much as appears, because he does recognize the incoherence and makes an attempt to get around it. The way of thinking is something like this: we need to avoid the concept of truth. But this means we also need to avoid the concept of asserting something, because if you assert something, you are saying that it is true. So he needs to say, “assertion does not exist,” but without asserting it. Consequently he comes up with the concept of “closure,” which is meant to replace the concept of asserting, and “asserts” things in the new sense. This sense is not intended to assert anything at all in the usual sense. In fact, he concludes that language does not refer to the world at all.

Apart from the evident absurdity, exacerbated by my own realist description of his position, we can see from the general account of self-reference why this is the wrong answer. The man in the room might start out wanting to draw a picture of the room and everything in it, and then come to realize that this project is impossible, at least for someone in his situation. But suppose he concludes: “After all, there is no such thing as a picture. I thought pictures were possible, but they are not. There are just marks on paper.” The conclusion is obviously wrong. The fact that pictures are things themselves does prevent pictures from being exhaustive pictures of themselves, but it does not prevent them from being pictures in general. And in the same way, the fact that we are part of reality prevents us from having an exhaustive understanding of reality, but it does not prevent us from understanding in general.

There is one last temptation in addition to the two ways discussed above of saying that there can be an exhaustive drawing of the room and the picture. The room itself and everything in it, is itself an exhaustive representation of itself and everything in it, someone might say. Apart from being an abuse of the word “representation,” I think this is delusional, but this a story for another time.

Consistency and Reality

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Consistency and inconsistency, in their logical sense, are relationships between statements or between the parts of a statement. They are not properties of reality as such.

“Wait,” you will say. “If consistency is not a property of reality, then you are implying that reality is not consistent. So reality is inconsistent?”

Not at all. Consistency and inconsistency are contraries, not contradictories, and they are properties of statements. So reality as such is neither consistent nor inconsistent, in the same way that sounds are neither white nor black.

We can however speak of consistency with respect to reality in an extended sense, just as we can speak of truth with respect to reality in an extended sense, even though truth refers first to things that are said or thought. In this way we can say that a thing is true insofar as it is capable of being known, and similarly we might say that reality is consistent, insofar as it is capable of being known by consistent claims, and incapable of being known by inconsistent claims. And reality indeed seems consistent in this way: I might know the weather if I say “it is raining,” or if I say, “it is not raining,” depending on conditions, but to say “it is both raining and not raining in the same way” is not a way of knowing the weather.

Consider the last point more precisely. Why can’t we use such statements to understand the world? The statement about the weather is rather different from statements like, “The normal color of the sky is not blue but rather green.” We know what it would be like for this to be the case. For example, we know what we would expect if it were the case. It cannot be used to understand the world in fact, because these expectations fail. But if they did not, we could use it to understand the world. Now consider instead the statement, “The sky is both blue and not blue in exactly the same way.” There is now no way to describe the expectations we would have if this were the case. It is not that we understand the situation and know that it does not apply, as with the claim about the color of the sky: rather, the situation described cannot be understood. It is literally unintelligible.

This also explains why we should not think of consistency as a property of reality in a primary sense. If it were, it would be like the color blue as a property of the sky. The sky is in fact blue, but we know what it would be like for it to be otherwise. We cannot equally say, “reality is in fact consistent, but we know what it would be like for it to be inconsistent.” Instead, the supposedly inconsistent situation is a situation that cannot be understood in the first place. Reality is thus consistent not in the primary sense but in a secondary sense, namely that it is rightly understood by consistent things.

But this also implies that we cannot push the secondary consistency of reality too far, in several ways and for several reasons.

First, while inconsistency as such does not contribute to our understanding of the world, a concrete inconsistent set of claims can help us understand the world, and in many situations better than any particular consistent set of claims that we might currently come up with. This was discussed in a previous post on consistency.

Second, we might respond to the above by pointing out that it is always possible in principle to formulate a consistent explanation of things which would be better than the inconsistent one. We might not currently be able to arrive at the consistent explanation, but it must exist.

But even this needs to be understood in a somewhat limited way. Any consistent explanation of things will necessarily be incomplete, which means that more complete explanations, whether consistent or inconsistent, will be possible. Consider for example these recent remarks of James Chastek on Gödel’s theorem:

1.) Given any formal system, let proposition (P) be this formula is unprovable in the system

2.) If P is provable, a contradiction occurs.

3.) Therefore, P is known to be unprovable.

4.) If P is known to be unprovable it is known to be true.

5.) Therefore, P is (a) unprovable in a system and (b) known to be true.

In the article linked by Chastek, John Lucas argues that this is a proof that the human mind is not a “mechanism,” since we can know to be true something that the mechanism will not able to prove.

But consider what happens if we simply take the “formal system” to be you, and “this formula is unprovable in the system” to mean “you cannot prove this statement to be true.” Is it true, or not? And can you prove it?

If you say that it is true but that you cannot prove it, the question is how you know that it is true. If you know by the above reasoning, then you have a syllogistic proof that it is true, and so it is false that you cannot prove it, and so it is false.

If you say that it is false, then you cannot prove it, because false things cannot be proven, and so it is true.

It is evident here that you can give no consistent response that you can know to be true; “it is true but I cannot know it to be true,” may be consistent, but obviously if it is true, you cannot know it to be true, and if it is false, you cannot know it to be true. What is really proven by Gödel’s theorem is not that the mind is not a “mechanism,” whatever that might be, but that any consistent account of arithmetic must be incomplete. And if any consistent account of arithmetic alone is incomplete, much  more must any consistent explanation of reality as a whole be incomplete. And among more complete explanations, there will be some inconsistent ones as well as consistent ones. Thus you might well improve any particular inconsistent position by adopting a consistent one, but you might again improve any particular consistent position by adopting an inconsistent one which is more complete.

The above has some relation to our discussion of the Liar Paradox. Someone might be tempted to give the same response to “tonk” and to “true”:

The problem with “tonk” is that it is defined in such a way as to have inconsistent implications. So the right answer is to abolish it. Just do not use that word. In the same way, “true” is defined in such a way that it has inconsistent implications. So the right answer is to abolish it. Just do not use that word.

We can in fact avoid drawing inconsistent conclusions using this method. The problem with the method is obvious, however. The word “tonk” does not actually exist, so there is no problem with abolishing it. It never contributed to our understanding of the world in the first place. But the word “true” does exist, and it contributes to our understanding of the world. To abolish it, then, would remove some inconsistency, but it would also remove part of our understanding of the world. We would be adopting a less complete but more consistent understanding of things.

Hilary Lawson discusses this response in Closure: A Story of Everything:

Russell and Tarski’s solution to self-referential paradox succeeds only by arbitrarily outlawing the paradox and thus provides no solution at all.

Some have claimed to have a formal, logical, solution to the paradoxes of self-reference. Since if these were successful the problems associated with the contemporary predicament and the Great Project could be solved forthwith, it is important to briefly examine them before proceeding further. The argument I shall put forward aims to demonstrate that these theories offer no satisfactory solution to the problem, and that they only appear to do so by obscuring the fact that they have defined their terms in such a way that the paradox is not so much avoided as outlawed.

The problems of self-reference that we have identified are analogous to the ancient liar paradox. The ancient liar paradox stated that ‘All Cretans are liars’ but was itself uttered by a Cretan thus making its meaning undecidable. A modern equivalent of this ancient paradox would be ‘This sentence is not true’, and the more general claim that we have already encountered: ‘there is no truth’. In each case the application of the claim to itself results in paradox.

The supposed solutions, Lawson says, are like the one suggested above: “Just do not use that word.” Thus he remarks on Tarski’s proposal:

Adopting Tarski’s hierarchy of languages one can formulate sentences that have the appearance of being self-referential. For example, a Tarskian version of ‘This sentence is not true’ would be:

(I) The sentence (I) is not true-in-L.

So Tarski’s argument runs, this sentence is both a true sentence of the language meta-L, and false in the language L, because it refers to itself and is therefore, according to the rules of Tarski’s logic and the hierarchy of languages, not properly formed. The hierarchy of languages apparently therefore enables self-referential sentences but avoids paradox.

More careful inspection however shows the manoeuvre to be engaged in a sleight of hand for the sentence as constructed only appears to be self-referential. It is a true sentence of the meta-language that makes an assertion of a sentence in L, but these are two different sentences – although they have superficially the same form. What makes them different is that the meaning of the predicate ‘is not true’ is different in each case. In the meta-language it applies the meta-language predicate ‘true’ to the object language, while in the object language it is not a predicate at all. As a consequence the sentence is not self-referential. Another way of expressing this point would be to consider the sentence in the meta-language. The sentence purports to be a true sentence in the meta-language, and applies the predicate ‘is not true’ to a sentence in L, not to a sentence in meta-L. Yet what is this sentence in L? It cannot be the same sentence for this is expressed in meta-L. The evasion becomes more apparent if we revise the example so that the sentence is more explicitly self-referential:

(I) The sentence (I) is not true-in-this-language.

Tarski’s proposal that no language is allowed to contain its own truth-predicate is precisely designed to make this example impossible. The hierarchy of languages succeeds therefore only by providing an account of truth which makes genuine self-reference impossible. It can hardly be regarded therefore as a solution to the paradox of self-reference, since if all that was required to solve the paradox was to ban it, this could have been done at the outset.

Someone might be tempted to conclude that we should say that reality is inconsistent after all. Since any consistent account of reality is incomplete, it must be that the complete account of reality is inconsistent: and so someone who understood reality completely, would do so by means of an inconsistent theory. And just as we said that reality is consistent, in a secondary sense, insofar as it is understood by consistent things, so in that situation, one would say that reality is inconsistent, in a secondary sense, because it is understood by inconsistent things.

The problem with this is that it falsely assumes that a complete and intelligible account of reality is possible. This is not possible largely for the same reasons that there cannot be a list of all true statements. And although we might understand things through an account which is in fact inconsistent, the inconsistency itself contributes nothing to our understanding, because the inconsistency is in itself unintelligible, just as we said about the statement that the sky is both blue and not blue in the same way.

We might ask whether we can at least give a consistent account superior to an account which includes the inconsistencies resulting from the use of “truth.” This might very well be possible, but it appears to me that no one has actually done so. This is actually one of Lawson’s intentions with his book, but I would assert that his project fails overall, despite potentially making some real contributions. The reader is nonetheless welcome to investigate for themselves.

Consistency

entirelyuseless Ethics, Logic, Uncategorized , ,

Logical consistency is important. If my positions fail to be consistent, this is clear proof that at least one of them is mistaken.

Nonetheless, logical consistency is not the supreme value. It would not be the supreme value even for someone who cared about truth alone. The reason for this is that someone may see that his position is inconsistent, and know that it follows that his position is partially mistaken, without knowing any concrete way to modify his position which will improve it. His best estimate of any particular modification may be that his position would end up containing a greater amount of error. In this case, caring about the truth will entail that he preserve his position without modification, despite recognizing that his position contains some falsity.

This happens to all of us, as we can see from one particular case. I would be foolish and arrogant if I believed, “All of my beliefs are true.” In order for that to be the case, I would have to be essentially infallible. So it is far more reasonable for me to believe that I am mistaken about some things. But then if we take all of my beliefs together, including the belief that “some of my beliefs are mistaken,” we can derive a contradiction.

And it is clear, in the general case, that I have no way to improve my position to eliminate the inconsistency. Believing that all of my beliefs are true would not improve it. It would add some consistency, but only by means of adding a definite falsity. Likewise, changing some other belief would not help, since even if some of my beliefs are mistaken, I do not know which ones those are. Changing a belief at random is likely to worsen my position overall. And if I examine my beliefs and come to the conclusion that I should modify one belief or another, this will not and should not change my conviction that some of my beliefs are mistaken.

 

Making Arguments vs. Manipulating Symbols

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There is still another problem with Spinoza’s manner of argumentation. Spinoza is trying to get geometrical certainty about metaphysics by a logical arrangement of his claims. But this cannot work even in principle. If you take the rules of logic and the forms of the syllogisms, and fit sentences into them using their mere verbal patterns, without thinking about what you are saying, what it means and in what sense it is true or untrue, then you are manipulating symbols, not actually making arguments, and it may well mean that your conclusion is false, whether or not each of your premises is true in some way.

Alexander Pruss, in a recent blog post, argues for the existence of God from certain facts about language:

This argument is valid:

  1. All semantic truths are knowable to members of the community of language users.
  2. There are semantic truths that are not knowable to human language users.
  3. Therefore, there is at least one non-human language user.

There is some reason to accept (1) in light of the conventionality of language. Premise (2) is going to be quite controversial. I justify it by means of a standard argument for epistemicism. Consider Queen Elizabeth II. There are 88 statements of the form:

  • Elizabeth was not old at age n but she was old at age n+1

where n ranges from 1 to 88. It’s a straightforward matter of classical logic to show that if all 88 statements are false, then:

  1. Elizabeth was old at age 1 or Elizabeth is not old at age 89.

But (4) is clearly false: Her Majesty is old now at age 89, and she surely wasn’t old at age one. So, at least one of the 88 statements is false. This means that there is a sharp transition from being not old to being old. But it is clear that no matter what we find out about our behavior, biology and other relevant things, we can’t know exactly where that transition lies. It seems very plausible that the relevant unknowable fact about the transition is a semantic fact. Hence, (2) is true.

The most plausible candidate for the non-human language user who is capable of knowing such semantic facts is God. God could institute the fundamental semantic facts of human language and thereby know them.

(“So, at least one of the 88 statements is false” should be “So, at least one of the 88 statements is true.”) I would consider this to be more a case of manipulating symbols than of making a serious argument.

An atheist is likely to say about this argument, “Wait a minute. Maybe it’s not obvious to me what is wrong with your argument. But there’s just no way you can prove the existence of God from simple facts about how words are used. So there must be something wrong with the argument.”

I agree with the hypothetical atheist that reasonable intuitions would say that you cannot prove the existence of God in such a way, and that this is a reason for doubting the argument even if you cannot formally point out what is wrong with it.

But in fact I think there are two basic problems with it. In the first place, Pruss seems to be failing to consider the actual meaning of his premises. He says, “There is some reason to accept (1) in light of the conventionality of language.” What does this mean? A semantic fact is a fact about the meaning of words or sentences. Pruss is arguing that all facts about the meanings of words or sentences should be knowable to members of the community of language users, and that we should accept this because language is conventional. In other words, human beings make up the meanings of words and sentences. So they can know these meanings; whatever they cannot know about the meaning is not a part of the meaning, since they have not invented it.

But later Pruss says:

This means that there is a sharp transition from being not old to being old. But it is clear that no matter what we find out about our behavior, biology and other relevant things, we can’t know exactly where that transition lies. It seems very plausible that the relevant unknowable fact about the transition is a semantic fact. Hence, (2) is true.

But if this is right, it undercuts the justification for believing the first premise. For the only reason we had to believe that all of the semantic facts are knowable to the community of language users, was a reason to believe that they were knowable to human beings. If they are not knowable to human beings, we no longer have a reason to believe that they are knowable to anyone, or at any rate not a reason that Pruss has given.

This illustrates my point about the necessity of considering the meaning of what you are saying. The argument for the first premise is in fact an argument that human beings can know all of the semantic facts; thus if they cannot, we no longer have a good reason to accept the first premise. We cannot simply say, “This argument is logically valid, we’ve given a reason for the first and a reason for the second, that gives us reason to accept the conclusion.” We need to think about what those reasons are and how they fit together.

The second problem with this argument is that the “standard argument for epistemicism” is just wrong. And likewise, the argument consists of precisely nothing but manipulating words, without thinking about the meaning behind them. It is a “a straightforward matter of classical logic” in the sense that we can fit these words into the logical forms, but this does not mean that this process is telling us anything about reality.

To see this, consider this new word that we can construct by convention, namely “zold.” A person who is between 80 and 90 years old is said to be zold; a person who is between 1 and 10 years old is said not to be zold.

Now consider the 88 statements of the form, “Elizabeth was not zold at age n but she was zold at age n+1.” It’s a straightforward matter of classical logic to show that if all 88 statements are false, then either Elizabeth was zold at age 1, or she was not zold at age 89. But this is clearly false according to the conventions already defined. So at least one of the statements must be true, and there is a sharp transition from being not zold to being zold. It is obvious that no matter what we find out about human beings, that will not tell us where the transition is; the transition must be a semantic fact, a fact about the meaning of the word “zold.”

Obviously, in reality there is no such semantic fact. The convention that we used to define the word simply does not suffice to generate a sharp transition. The problem with the argument for the sharp transition is that the rules of logic presuppose perfectly well defined terms, and this term is not perfectly well defined.

And it is not difficult to see that the word “old” does not differ in a meaningful way from the word “zold.” In reality the two come to have meaning in very similar ways, and in a such a way that there cannot be a sharply defined transition, nor can classical logic force there to be such a sharp transition.

It is not enough to fit your sentences into a logical form. If you want the truth, the hard work of thinking about reality cannot be avoided.

Liar Game

entirelyuseless Logic, Uncategorized , ,

While this is the name of a certain story, it is also the name I am giving to the game I am about to propose. The rules are that I propose a certain number of statements, and the player has to categorize them as true or false. The player wins if all of them are correctly categorized, and fails if he does not categorize them all, or if he mistakenly categorizes a true statement as false, or a false statement as true. It is against the rules for him to place a statement in both categories.

The statements I propose are the following:

  1. 2+2=4.
  2. 2+2=5.
  3. The player will categorize this as false.

It can easily be seen that the player is guaranteed to lose the game. If the player does not categorize the third statement, then it is false, and he has failed to categorize them all. On the other hand, if he categorizes it as true, it is false, and if he categorizes it as false, it is true. In any case either he fails to categorize it, or he categorizes it incorrectly.

It is evident that this is related to the paradox of the Liar, but there is a significant difference. The original liar statement is paradoxical, in the sense that applying the ordinary rules of logic results in a contradiction regardless of whether one considers the statement to be true or false.

This is not the case here. There is nothing paradoxical about the statement, in this sense. Given an actual player and an actual instance of playing the game, the statement will plainly be true or false in an objective sense, and without any contradiction being implied. It is just that the player cannot possibly categorize it correctly, since its truth is correlated with the player categorizing it as false.

 

The Paradox of the Heap

entirelyuseless Logic, Metaphysics , ,

The paradox of the heap argues in this way:

A large pile of sand is composed of grains of sand. But taking away a grain of sand from a pile of sand cannot make a pile of sand stop being a pile of sand. Therefore if you continually take away grains of sand from the pile until only one grain of sand remains, that grain must still be a pile of sand.

A similar argument can be made with any vague word that can differ by an apparently continuous number of degrees. Thus for example it is applied to whether a man has a beard (he should not be able to change from having a beard to not having a beard by the removal of a single hair), to colors (an imperceptible variation of color should not be able to change a thing from being red to not being red), and so on.

The conclusion, that a single grain of sand is a pile of sand, or that a shaven man has a beard, or that the color blue is red, is obviously false. In order to block the deduction, it seems necessary to say that it fails at a particular point. But this means that at some point, a pile of sand will indeed stop being a pile of sand when you take away a single grain. But this seems absurd.

Suppose you don’t know the meaning of “red,” and someone attempts to explain. They presumably do so by pointing to examples of red things. But this does not provide you with a rigid definition of redness that you could use to determine whether some arbitrary color is an example of red or not. Rather, the probability that you will call something red will vary continuously as the color of things becomes more remote from the examples from which you learned the name, being very high for the canonical examples and becoming very low as you approach other colors such as blue.

This explains why setting a boundary where an imperceptible change of color would change something from being red to being not red seems inappropriate. Red doesn’t have a rigid definition in the first place, and assigning such a boundary would mean assigning such a definition. But this would be modifying the meaning of the word. Consequently, if the meaning is accepted in an unmodified form, the deduction cannot logically be blocked, just as in the previous post, if the meaning of “true” is accepted in an unmodified form, one cannot block the deduction that all statements are both true and false.

Someone might conclude from this that I am accepting the conclusions of the paradoxical arguments, and therefore that I am saying that all statements are both true and false, and that a single grain of sand is a pile, and so on.

I am not. Concluding that this is my position is simply making the exact same mistake that is made in the original paradoxes. And that mistake is to assume a perfection in human language which does not exist. “True,” “pile,” and so on, are words that possess meaning in an imperfect way. Ultimately all human words are imperfect in this way, because all human language is vague. The fact that logic cannot block the paradoxical conclusions without modifying the meanings of our words happens not because those conclusions are true, but because the meanings are imperfect, while logic presupposes a perfection of meaning which is simply not there.

In a number of other places I have talked about how various motivations can lead us astray. But there are some areas where the very desire for truth can lead us away from truth, and the discussion of such logical paradoxes, and of the vagueness of human thought and language, is one of those areas. In particular, the desire for truth can lead us to wish to believe that truth is more attainable than it actually is. In this case it would happen by wishing to believe that human language is more perfect than it is, as for example that “red” really does have a meaning that would cause something in an a definitive way to stop being red at some point with an imperceptible change, or in the case of the Liar, to assert that the word “true” really does have something like a level subscript attached to its meaning, or that it has some other definition which can block the paradoxical deductions.

These things are not true. Nor are the paradoxical conclusions.