August
22, 2017 Tuesday
Bedtime
Story
The Paradoxes are Revealing
To
logicians like Abhari, Tusi and Tarski such paradoxes reveal something deep and
perhaps essential about human thought; that they are a recurrent part of human
intellectual activity.
Tarski
has his own opinion about such paradoxes and takes a middle ground.
He
does not give them the high status of placing them as a permanent element of
our knowledge system.
Neither
is he willing to dismiss them off lightly.
Tarski
considers these paradoxes as symptoms of some underlying disease.
They
tend to start with premises that seem obvious and simple.
They
use reasoning that seems intuitive and straight forward.
Yet
the final result is nonsense.
Tarski
says that whenever something like this happens it is a strong indication that
we need to revise our thinking.
Either
some premises that we long held need to be rejected or the arguments on which
the paradox relies need to be improved.
This
is to be done for two reasons.
One
is to take care of the existing paradox or paradoxes and to have a logical
justification for their origins.
The
second is to prevent any further paradoxes from arising in the future.
Once
a new system of thinking has been developed, it needs to be thoroughly tested.
One
of the crucial tests of this new system of thinking would be to try to
reconstruct the old paradox within it.
This
single test in the arena of pure thought and logic is as critical and as
necessary as performing an experiment is physical sciences.
Tarski
on his paper once again asks us to go back to the Liar Paradox.
It
essentially involves the notion of truth with regard to random sentence in
English.
It
can be retranslated to be made to applicable to other natural languages.
Is
there any way this paradox can be got rid of?
Tarski
suggests one radical proposal.
Simply
eliminate the word “true” from the English vocabulary or if that is not
possible, at least refrain from using it in any serious discussion.
I
am sure there would be very many people who would consider such a serious
surgical excision of the English vocabulary highly unacceptable.
Men
who would object to outright banishing of the word “true” might perhaps be more
inclined to adapt something more compromising.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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