snowgirl's Journal: Quine's Paradox

I was reading about Self-Reference on Wikipedia, and I came across an interesting article about Quine's Paradox.

The article essentially deals with the assertion by the infamous Quine that simply being able to assert truth or falsehood can create paradox.

I'm immediately brought to consider MarxistHacker42, who often times I have known to make the assertion that truth or falsehood could not ever be unequivably determined. Rather at best one can simply make assertions of their personal mythos, essentially asserting what they believe to be true.

I would personally say that this provides the ultimate view of scepticism, not of relativism. Since rather than asserting that everyone's personal point of view is true, it asserts that no ones personal point of view is true, nor false, but rather undeterminable.

I've found myself now in life during arguments much more able to handle alternate points of view, and talk to people in general. Knowing that we're not really ever truely working towards a Truth (with capital T) but rather just working towards what we believe.

Of course, the position allows you great freedom. I am able to assert that God exists without having to PROVE it, as everything is unprovable. Prove to me that you even exist, truly, it's never more clear that the only thing that we can prove exists is our own personal existence, and not even anyone else's.

Once you deny true and false, you're free to actually think about what you believe, without regard to if you will create a paradox, or hypocritic assertion. The later being especially important, as we all make hypocritic assertions... my favorite being the hypocritical notion that tolerance is naturally intolerant of intolerance.

Anyways, I've missed these arguments, that challenge my assertions about true and false.

Interesting...

[johndiii]

The notion of language as a means for determining truth or falsehood is interesting. Even discussing truth brings out a certain, well, elasticity in the notion of "truth" as expressed in human language. It mirrors the same quality in one's mind - the ability to consider a concept, and think about its truth or falsehood. I think that this is one of the key components of human sapience. But is it inbred or learned? There are certainly some people who have great difficulty thinking in a hypothetical mode.

Amendment

[johndiii]

The phrase "the act of faith is impossible in the face of certainty" should be "the act of faith is impossible in the face of proof". Certainty is an internal condition, while proof is something that can be demonstrated to others (I'd say an objective condition, but I'm not sure that is appropriate to this discussion :-) )

You have done well grasshopper

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The next thing to learn is that if we're incapable of knowing for sure true or false- then one can even be tolerant of the intolerant, because we simply don't know when they might be correct. :-)

One of the harder things I'm dealing with this week is the death of a man I only met once. His daughter married my brother in law on Memorial Day. The military had sent him home especially for that occasion- he was shipped out to Afghanistan the next day. This past weekend his patrol was blown up by a Taliban am