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I am a liar.

שו”תCategory: philosophyI am a liar.
asked 4 years ago

Just a small comment that occurs to me (right now) about yesterday’s lesson:
According to what you said, the sentence “I am a liar” means that everything I say is false, and therefore this sentence is also false and this creates a paradox, but in the end you see that there is no paradox because “I am not lying” = there is at least one sentence of mine that is true and it does not have to be this sentence.
 
I didn’t understand why you dismiss this paradox in such a distant and indirect way. You assume that I am a liar = all my sentences are false, but that’s not true. “I am a liar” = “I am usually a person who lies,” because it is clear that no one in the world always lies, there is no doubt, and therefore we can say that this sentence he says about himself (I am a liar) is true, meaning that he often lies, but not here.
And actually, “all Cretans are liars” I don’t see it as a paradox (even without getting to your patron), all Cretans are liars, but what I’m saying now is true.


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מיכי Staff answered 4 years ago
This is a semantic discussion that doesn’t really matter. The question is, assuming that a liar is someone who lies about everything, does a paradox arise or not? If this is the meaning of the word “liar,” then use a different word. Our goal here is not to clarify the meaning of a word, but to discuss paradoxes.

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EA replied 4 years ago

Aaa I understand I understand thank you.

Is the sentence "I am beautiful" or "I am fat" a self-reference?

מיכי replied 4 years ago

Not really (at least in the sense I'm talking about). Because beauty and fat describe the body and the claim is made by the mind. “I think” (as in Cogito) and perhaps also “I am smart” these are more self-references in my sense.

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