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Buttered cat paradox: Humorous example of a paradox from contradicting proverbs. Intentionally blank page: Many documents contain pages on which the text "This page intentionally left blank" is printed, thereby making the page not blank. Metabasis paradox: Conflicting definitions of what is the best kind of tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics.
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.
This category contains paradoxes in mathematics, but excluding those concerning informal logic. "Paradox" here has the sense of "unintuitive result", rather than "apparent contradiction". "Paradox" here has the sense of "unintuitive result", rather than "apparent contradiction".
In mathematical logic, Russell's paradox (also known as Russell's antinomy) is a set-theoretic paradox published by the British philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell, in 1901. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Russell's paradox shows that every set theory that contains an unrestricted comprehension principle leads to contradictions. [ 3 ]
Zeno's arguments may then be early examples of a method of proof called reductio ad absurdum, also known as proof by contradiction. Thus Plato has Zeno say the purpose of the paradoxes "is to show that their hypothesis that existences are many, if properly followed up, leads to still more absurd results than the hypothesis that they are one."
Aristotle's wheel paradox is a paradox or problem appearing in the pseudo-Aristotelian Greek work Mechanica. It states as follows: A wheel is depicted in two-dimensional space as two circles . Its larger, outer circle is tangential to a horizontal surface (e.g. a road that it rolls on), while the smaller, inner one has the same center and is ...
In philosophy and mathematics, Newcomb's paradox, also known as Newcomb's problem, is a thought experiment involving a game between two players, one of whom is able to predict the future. Newcomb's paradox was created by William Newcomb of the University of California 's Lawrence Livermore Laboratory .
Although statements can be self referential without being paradoxical ("This statement is written in English" is a true and non-paradoxical self-referential statement), self-reference is a common element of paradoxes. One example occurs in the liar paradox, which is commonly formulated as the self-referential statement "This statement is false ...