Paradox

A paradox is a statement that, despite apparently sound reasoning from true premises,
leads to a self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion.Some logical paradoxes
are known to be invalid arguments but are still valuable in promoting critical thinking.
Some paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions assumed to be rigorous, and have
caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One example is Russell’s
paradox, which questions whether a "list of all lists that do not contain themselves" would
include itself, and showed that attempts to found set theory on the identification of sets
with properties or predicates were flawed. Others, such as Curry’s paradox, are not yet
resolved.
Examples outside logic include the Ship of Theseus from philosophy (questioning whether
a ship repaired over time by replacing each of its wooden parts would remain the same
ship). Paradoxes can also take the form of images or other media. For example, M.C. Escher
featured perspective-based paradoxes in many of his drawings, with walls that are
regarded as floors from other points of view, and staircases that appear to climb endlessly.
Logical paradox
Common themes in paradoxes include self-reference, infinite regress, circular definitions,
and confusion between different levels of abstraction.
Patrick Hughes outlines three laws of the paradox:
Self-reference
An example is "This statement is false", a form of the liar paradox. The statement is
referring to itself. Another example of self-reference is the question of whether the barber
shaves himself in the barber paradox. One more example would be "Is the answer to this
question ’No’?"
Contradiction
"This statement is false"; the statement cannot be false and true at the same time. Another
example of contradiction is if a man talking to a genie wishes that wishes couldn’t come
true. This contradicts itself because if the genie grants his wish, he did not grant his wish,
and if he refuses to grant his wish, then he did indeed grant his wish, therefore making it
impossible to either grant or not grant his wish because his wish contradicts itself.
Vicious circularity, or infinite regress
"This statement is false"; if the statement is true, then the statement is false, thereby making
the statement true. Another example of vicious circularity is the following group of
statements:
"The following sentence is true."
"The previous sentence is false."
Other paradoxes involve false statements ("impossible is not a word in my vocabulary", a
simple paradox) or half-truths and the resulting biased assumptions. This form is common
in howlers.
For example, consider a situation in which a father and his son are driving down the road.
The car crashes into a tree and the father is killed. The boy is rushed to the nearest hospital
where he is prepared for emergency surgery. On entering the surgery suite, the surgeon
says, "I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son."
The apparent paradox is caused by a hasty generalization, for if the surgeon is the boy’s
father, the statement cannot be true. The paradox is resolved if it is revealed that the
surgeon is a woman — the boy’s mother.
Paradoxes which are not based on a hidden error generally occur at the fringes of context or
language, and require extending the context or language in order to lose their paradoxical
quality. Paradoxes that arise from apparently intelligible uses of language are often of
interest to logicians and philosophers. "This sentence is false" is an example of the
well-known liar paradox: it is a sentence which cannot be consistently interpreted as either
true or false, because if it is known to be false, then it is known that it must be true, and if it
is known to be true, then it is known that it must be false. Russell’s paradox, which shows
that the notion of the set of all those sets that do not contain themselves leads to a
contradiction, was instrumental in the development of modern logic and set theory.
Thought experiments can also yield interesting paradoxes. The grandfather paradox, for
example, would arise if a time traveller were to kill his own grandfather before his mother
or father had been conceived, thereby preventing his own birth. This is a specific example
of the more general observation of the butterfly effect, or that a time-traveller’s interaction
with the past — however slight — would entail making changes that would, in turn,
change the future in which the time-travel was yet to occur, and would thus change the
circumstances of the time-travel itself.
Often a seemingly paradoxical conclusion arises from an inconsistent or inherently
contradictory definition of the initial premise. In the case of that apparent paradox of a time
traveler killing his own grandfather it is the inconsistency of defining the past to which he
returns as being somehow different from the one which leads up to the future from which
he begins his trip but also insisting that he must have come to that past from the same
future as the one that it leads up to.
Quine’s classification
See also: Veridicality
W. V. Quine (1962) distinguished between three classes of paradoxes:[8]
A veridical paradox produces a result that appears absurd but is demonstrated to be true
nevertheless. Thus, the paradox of Frederic’s birthday in The Pirates of Penzance
establishes the surprising fact that a twenty-one-year-old would have had only five
birthdays if he had been born on a leap day. Likewise, Arrow’s impossibility theorem
demonstrates difficulties in mapping voting results to the will of the people. The Monty
Hall paradox demonstrates that a decision which has an intuitive 50-50 chance in fact is
heavily biased towards making a decision which, given the intuitive conclusion, the player
would be unlikely to make. In 20th century science, Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel
and Schrödinger’s cat are famously vivid examples of a theory being taken to a logical but
paradoxical end.
A falsidical paradox establishes a result that not only appears false but actually is false, due
to a fallacy in the demonstration. The various invalid mathematical proofs (e.g., that 1 = 2)
are classic examples, generally relying on a hidden division by zero. Another example is
the inductive form of the horse paradox, which falsely generalizes from true specific
statements. Zeno’s paradoxes are falsidical, concluding for example that a flying arrow
never reaches its target or that a speedy runner cannot catch up to a tortoise with a small
head start.
A paradox that is in neither class may be an antinomy, which reaches a self-contradictory
result by properly applying accepted ways of reasoning. For example, the Grelling–Nelson
paradox points out genuine problems in our understanding of the ideas of truth and
description.
A fourth kind has sometimes been described since Quine’s work.
A paradox that is both true and false at the same time and in the same sense is called a
dialetheia. In Western logics it is often assumed, following Aristotle, that no dialetheia
exist, but they are sometimes accepted in Eastern traditions (e.g. in the Mohists, the
Gongsun Longzi, and in Zen) and in paraconsistent logics. It would be mere equivocation
or a matter of degree, for example, to both affirm and deny that "John is here" when John is
halfway through the door but it is self-contradictory to simultaneously affirm and deny the
event in some sense.
In philosophy
A taste for paradox is central to the philosophies of Laozi, Zhuangzi, Heraclitus, Bhartrhari,
Meister Eckhart, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and G.K. Chesterton, among many others.
Søren Kierkegaard, for example, writes, in the Philosophical Fragments, that
But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the
thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow. But the
ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall, and so it is also
the ultimate passion of the understanding to will the collision, although in one way or
another the collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of
thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.[12]
In medicine
A paradoxical reaction to a drug is the opposite of what one would expect, such as
becoming agitated by a sedative or sedated by a stimulant. Some are common and are used
regularly in medicine, such as the use of stimulants such as Adderall and Ritalin in the
treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (also known as ADHD or ADD,) while
others are rare and can be dangerous as they are not expected, such as severe agitation from
a benzodiazepine.
All horses are the same color
The horse paradox is a falsidical paradox that arises from flawed demonstrations, which
purport to use mathematical induction, of the statement All horses are the same color.
There is no actual contradiction, as these arguments have a crucial flaw that makes them
incorrect. This example was originally raised by George Pólya. The paradox was also used
by Joel E. Cohen as an example of the subtle errors that can occur in attempts to prove
statements by induction.
The argument
The argument is proof by induction. First we establish a base case for one horse ( n = 1
{\displaystyle n=1} n=1). We then prove that if n horses have the same color, then n + 1
{\displaystyle n+1} n+1 horses must also have the same color.
Base case: One horse
The case with just one horse is trivial. If there is only one horse in the "group", then clearly
all horses in that group have the same color.
Inductive step
Assume that n horses always are the same color. Let us consider a group consisting of n + 1
{\displaystyle n+1} n+1 horses.
First, exclude the last horse and look only at the first n horses; all these are the same color
since n horses always are the same color. Likewise, exclude the first horse and look only at
the last n horses. These too, must also be of the same color. Therefore, the first horse in the
group is of the same color as the horses in the middle, who in turn are of the same color as
the last horse. Hence the first horse, middle horses, and last horse are all of the same color,
and we have proven that:
If n horses have the same color, then n + 1 {\displaystyle n+1} n+1 horses will also have the
same color.
We already saw in the base case that the rule ("all horses have the same color") was valid
for n = 1 {\displaystyle n=1} n=1. The inductive step showed that since the rule is valid for
n = 1 {\displaystyle n=1} n=1, it must also be valid for n = 2 {\displaystyle n=2} n=2, which
in turn implies that the rule is valid for n = 3 {\displaystyle n=3} n=3 and so on.
Thus in any group of horses, all horses must be the same color.[3]
Explanation
The argument above makes the implicit assumption that the two subsets of horses to which
the induction assumption is applied have a common element. This is not true when the
original set (prior to either removal) only contains two horses.
Let the two horses be horse A and horse B. When horse A is removed, it is true that the
remaining horses in the set are the same color (only horse B remains). The same is true
when horse B is removed. However the statement "the first horse in the group is of the
same color as the horses in the middle" is meaningless, because there are no "horses in the
middle" (common elements (horses) in the two sets). Therefore the above proof has a logical
link broken. The proof forms a falsidical paradox; it seems to show by valid reasoning
something that is manifestly false, but in fact the reasoning is flawed.

Variations:
• Proof by induction that all horses are white:
Theorem: For any (finite) set of horses, all of the horses are the same color.
We prove this by induction on n, the size of the set of horses.
Base case: n=1, obviously since there’s only one horse in the set it has just one color.
Inductive step: Suppose that all sets of n-1 horses are of the same color, and consider a set of
size n. Removing one horse, call it h, we obtain a set of size n-1, so by the inductive hypothesis all
horses except h have the same color. But putting h back and removing a different horse gives us
another set of size n-1 including h, so the inductive hypothesis shows that h has the same color as
the other horses, so all the horses in the full set have the same color.
Thus, all horses in the world have the same color. Since I’ve seen a white horse, all horses are
white.
The induction step fails at n=2. The language gets just a bit vague at that point (of course), so it’s
tricky to say exactly which statement is false. You could interpret "h has the same color as the
other horses" to mean all horses besides the one that was removed, which is technically true since
that set is empty, but then you can’t conclude that h and the other removed horse are the same
color just because they are both the same color as "all the other horses".
This fake proof is kind of funny in that it works best on people familiar with math; in my
experience if you try to explain it to someone who doesn’t already understand proof by induction
intuitively they find the error right away.
• Theorem. All horses are the same color.
Proof. We’ll induct on the number of horses. Base case: 1 horse. Clearly with just 1 horse, all
horses have the same color.
Now, for the inductive step: we’ll show that if it is true for any group of N horses, that all have
the same color, then it is true for any group of N+1 horses.
Well, given any set of N+1 horses, if you exclude the last horse, you get a set of N horses. By the
inductive step these N horses all have the same color. But by excluding the first horse in the pack
of N+1 horses, you can conclude that the last N horses also have the same color. Therefore all N+1
horses have the same color. QED.
Hmmn... clearly not all horses have the same color. So what’s wrong with this proof by
induction?
Presentation Suggestions:
This delightful puzzle is an excellent test of student understanding of proofs by induction.
The Math Behind the Fact:
Hint: what could be wrong? You showed the base case. And you showed the inductive step,
right?
Well actually, the argument in the inductive step breaks down in going from n=1 to n=2, because
the first 1 horse and the last 1 horse have no horses in common, and therefore may not all have
the same color.
• All numbers are the same
Pf: First I will show that for any countable set of numbers Z, all the numbers in Z are the same.
Let A = {a, b, c, ..., d} be any nonempty subset of Z. Then a = b= c= ... = d as I shall show by
induction on the number of elements in A. Notice that for all singletons, A = {a}, the statement is
vacuously true. Now assume that the statement is true for any subset that contains n elements
{a1, a2, ..., an} and let A = {a1, a2, ..., a(n+1)} with n + 1 elements. Then the set B= {a1, a2, ..., an}
has n elements and so by assumption a1 = a2 = ... = an. Likewise the set C = {a2, a3, ..., a(n+1)}
has n elements and so by assumption a2 = a3 = ... = a(n+1). Combining these two sets of equalities,
a1 = a2 = a3 = ... = a(n+1). So all the elements of A are the same. Hence, by induction, all numbers
in Z are the same.
Next I will show that all numbers are the same. By the first part, all integers are the same.
Suppose there is a number which is not the same as the integers, call it w. Then the set W = {w}
union the integers is a countable set of numbers and so by the first part they are all the same,
contradicting the statement that w is different. Therefore, all numbers are the same. This same
argument can be used to prove that all horses are the same color. And since Washington rode a
white horse, we know that all horses are white. Since horses have two hindlegs in back and
forelegs in front, that makes 6 legs so they have an even number of legs. However, for a mammal, 6
is an odd number of legs and so they have a number of legs which is both even and odd. Since no
number is both even and odd, they must have infinitely many legs. We know that in the Triple
Crown of 1973, Secretariat raced on all three legs, but that’s a horse of another color.