Add new comment
-
Want facts and want them fast? Our Maths in a minute series explores key mathematical concepts in just a few words.
The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the differences between us. Understanding these inequalities is crucial for this and future pandemics.
Now it's the turn of mathematicians to help to improve the communities of the future.
There have been accusations that the modelling projecting the course of the pandemic was too pessimistic. Are they justified?
We all know what turbulence is, but nobody understands it.
Find out about the beautifully intuitive concept that lies at the heart of calculus.
Would one of Hofstadter's quotations such as Quine's paradox " 'Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation' yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" solve your problem? (See the author's "Godel, Escher and Bach" or "Metamagical Themas", as cited below, for more examples)
In fact, if one thoroughly applies this argument, assuming that any sentence written in a predefined language assumes prior knowledge of the higher level meaning of the symbols used, wouldn't any similar paradoxal statement fall into this category?
I do understand the point you make, however, in a way that suggests that the paradoxal character of this sentence in particular is context-dependent.
Nonetheless, going much further in this direction would be too out of scope here, as already mentioned below.