Quine's paradox is a paradox concerning truth values, attributed to Willard Van Orman Quine. It is related to the liar paradox as a problem, and it purports to show that a sentence can be paradoxical even if it is not self-referring and does not use demonstratives or indexicals (i.e. it does not explicitly refer to itself). The paradox can be expressed as follows:
- "Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
If the paradox is not clear, consider each part of the above description of the paradox incrementally:
- it = yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation
- its quotation = "yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation"
- it preceded by its quotation = "yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
With these tools, we may now reconsider the description of the paradox. It can be seen to assert the following:
- The statement "'yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation' yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" is false.
In other words, the sentence implies that it is false, which is paradoxical—for if it is false, what it states is in fact true.
Read more about Quine's Paradox: Motivation, Application
Famous quotes containing the words quine and/or paradox:
“The mastery of one’s phonemes may be compared to the violinist’s mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor’s renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.”
—W.V. Quine (b. 1908)
“A good aphorism is too hard for the teeth of time and is not eaten up by all the centuries, even though it serves as food for every age: hence it is the greatest paradox in literature, the imperishable in the midst of change, the nourishment which—like salt—is always prized, but which never loses its savor as salt does.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)