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From: gary@cgdra.ucar.edu (Gary Strand)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Fun with the semantics of paradox
Message-ID: <1361@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 2 Feb 89 16:52:59 GMT
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Reply-To: gary@cgdra.ucar.edu (Gary Strand)
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Article <583@soleil.UUCP> peru@soleil.UUCP (Dave Peru) says :
>When you view the meaning of a paradox, your brain is on a razor's edge.
>Depending on what side you fall, the paradox is decidedly true or false.
>Example:  This statement is false.

  What I think is happening is that people are assuming that a given English
sentence must have some kind of logical truth/falsehood to it, merely because
we can state it as a sentence. 

  I can think of literally thousands of perfectly good sentences that are in 
fact total nonsense, to wit:

  "Bananas are elephants."
  "All good men are Buicks."
  "Truth is defined to be that which is sugar."
  "For something to be false means that it is wavy like a reed in a gale."

  All these sentences are perfectly good from a purely syntactical viewpoint,
ie they are gramatically correct, but that says nothing about whether or not
they actually MEAN anything.

  I think this also applies to such things as:

  "This sentence is paradox."

  "The following sentence is false."
  "The previous sentence is true." (or whatever the doublet is)

  My point is that English allows the generation of thousands of sentences 
that need not have any meaning. Thus, there is more to a 'correct' sentence
than just following grammatical rules.

  Does thus make sense?

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