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One example occurs in the liar paradox, which is commonly formulated as the self-referential statement "This statement is false". [16] Another example occurs in the barber paradox, which poses the question of whether a barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves will shave himself. In this paradox, the barber is a self ...
Bertrand's box paradox: A paradox of conditional probability closely related to the Boy or Girl paradox. Bertrand's paradox: Different common-sense definitions of randomness give quite different results. Birthday paradox: In a random group of only 23 people, there is a better than 50/50 chance two of them have the same birthday.
In literature, the paradox is an anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas for the sake of striking exposition or unexpected insight. It functions as a method of literary composition and analysis that involves examining apparently contradictory statements and drawing conclusions either to reconcile them or to explain their presence.
A bootstrap paradox, also known as an information loop, an information paradox, [6] an ontological paradox, [7] or a "predestination paradox" is a paradox of time travel that occurs when any event, such as an action, information, an object, or a person, ultimately causes itself, as a consequence of either retrocausality or time travel. [8] [9 ...
A notable exception to the above may be the Grelling–Nelson paradox, in which words and meaning are the elements of the scenario rather than people and hair-cutting. Though it is easy to refute the barber's paradox by saying that such a barber does not (and cannot ) exist, it is impossible to say something similar about a meaningfully defined ...
Polanyi's paradox, named in honour of the British-Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi, is the theory that human knowledge of how the world functions and of our own capability are, to a large extent, beyond our explicit understanding.
One example is the Banach–Tarski paradox, a theorem widely considered to be nonintuitive. It states that it is possible to decompose a ball of a fixed radius into a finite number of pieces and then move and reassemble those pieces by ordinary translations and rotations (with no scaling) to obtain two copies from the one original copy.
Simpson's example actually highlighted a phenomenon called noncollapsibility, [32] which occurs when subgroups with high proportions do not make simple averages when combined. This suggests that the paradox may not be a universal phenomenon, but rather a specific instance of a more general statistical issue.