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 line that I am urging as today’s conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a repudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“... it is the desert’s grimness, its stillness and isolation, that bring us back to love. Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)