Re: Intuitions, Illusions and Common Sense

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Daryl McCullough) writes:
>Neil W Rickert says...

>>When I first came across the liar paradox (as a child), I found it
>>amusing.  It never seemed puzzling.  It never seemed that there was
>>anything that had to be solved.

>Well nothing ever *has* to be solved, but by definition, a paradox
>consists of a sequence of reasoning steps that *appear* to be valid,
>but which lead to a nonsensical or contradictory conclusion. The
>puzzle is to figure which step or steps was invalid.

It never appeared to be valid to me.  But then I don't assume natural
language statements to be logic.  We were taught logic at somewhere
around 3rd or 4th grade, and it already seemed obvious to me that
logic was not how people were making decisions about everyday things
(as distinct from mathematics).

The liar is amusing because it has the apparent form of a natural
language statement, but what it says is nonsense.  In that sense, the
liar is like some of Lewis Carrol's nonsense sentences, or Chomsky's
"colorless green ideas sleep furiously".  None of these present any
real puzzle.