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liar paradox

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Also known as liar's paradox

statement of a liar who states that they are lying: for instance, declaring that "I am lying" or "everything I say is false"

In the Vinony graph

Vinony's link graph records 210 inbound references to liar paradox, and connects out to paradox, Gödel's incompleteness theorems and fuzzy logic.

Vinony files it under Ancient Greek logic, Communication of falsehoods and Lying.

Vinony links it to 37 Wikipedia language editions.

~23 min read

Encyclopedic overview

In philosophy and logic, the classical liar paradox or liar's paradox or antinomy of the liar is the statement of a liar that they are lying: for instance, declaring that "I am lying". If the liar is indeed lying, then the liar is telling the truth, which means the liar just lied. In "this sentence is a lie", the paradox is strengthened in order to make it amenable to more rigorous logical analysis. It is still generally called the "liar paradox" although abstraction is made precisely from the liar making the statement. Trying to assign to this statement, the strengthened liar, a classical binary truth value leads to a contradiction.

Assume that "this sentence is false" is true, then we can trust its content, which states the opposite and thus causes a contradiction. Similarly, we get a contradiction when we assume the opposite.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “liar paradox” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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