561
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
561 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43984 readers
484 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
“This sentence is a lie” sounds false but is actually true. I think?
A description is "autological" if it describes itself. For example:
A description is "heterological" if it does not describe itself. For example:
Now, is the word "heterological" itself heterological?
The following phrase is autological: "is currently being read by an idiot"
Liar.
Well, that makes it true then.
It's not easy to say whether it is or not. This is something called the Liar Paradox and it has a surprising amount of potential solutions. That article linked explains it really well but, be warned, it is a bit dry.
The solution one of my professors gave that makes most sense to me is that, as a standalone sentence, "this sentence is a lie" is neither true nor false. At first glance the sentence makes sense and "lie" leads us to think that there is an untruth somewhere but there can't be as there is no 'truth value' within it. That is to say that there is nothing in the sentence that can either be true or false therefore there is nothing that can be lied about.
Only one of many potential solutions so though. So, maybe?
Vsauce?