8 Paradoxes Guaranteed To Melt Your Mind

8. This Statement Is False

PINOCCHIO nose
Walt Disney Pictures

We'll kick off with an easy one. The Liar Paradox, or sometimes the Pinocchio Paradox, is a semantic paradox in which a sentence infinitely contradicts itself.

If a person says "This statement is false", then that statement can be neither true nor false, creating a paradox.

Consider:

(A) "This statement is false" If the (A) is true, then thestatement "this statement is false" is true,therefore (A) is false. But if (A) is false then the statement "this statement is false" is false, therefore (A) is true.

And so on until the eventual heat death of the universe.

The Pinocchio variant of this paradox has Pinocchio, a puppet whose nose grows whenever he lies, say the words "my nose is growing". If he is telling a lie, his nose would grow, but if his nose grows then he would tell the truth and so his nose wouldn't grow.

Some of the greatest minds have argued about this, the simplest of paradoxes, and they mostly boil down to "well, it's just language, innit?"

It is, however, a good way to put your brain into gear for a bit of logical reasoning.

 
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