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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.
Paradoxes can also take the form of images or other media. For example, M.C. Escher featured perspective-based paradoxes in many of his drawings, with walls that are regarded as floors from other points of view, and staircases that appear to climb endlessly. [14] Informally, the term paradox is often used to describe a counterintuitive result.
Topics about Paradoxes in general should be placed in relevant topic categories. Pages in this category should be moved to subcategories where applicable. This category may require frequent maintenance to avoid becoming too large.
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".
The infinitely dense gravitational singularity found as time approaches an initial point in the Big Bang universe is an example of a physical paradox. A common paradox occurs with mathematical idealizations such as point sources which describe physical phenomena well at distant or global scales but break down at the point itself.
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.
The Berry paradox is a self-referential paradox arising from an expression like "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters" (a phrase with fifty-seven letters). Bertrand Russell , the first to discuss the paradox in print, attributed it to G. G. Berry (1867–1928), [ 1 ] a junior librarian at Oxford 's Bodleian Library .