The liar paradox?
What do you think of this application of the liar paradox:
A murderer comes to a person, pulls out a gun and tells him: I will kill you, you have no way to be saved, but if you despair of your life and know that you have no hope, then I will let you go. This is about him being able to truly know whether his victim is despairing or not by one means or another, (and it is also about him truly having no chance of being saved by nature).
Apparently the loop is as follows: If he doesn’t despair, then he should despair, and if he despairs again, he shouldn’t despair, and it’s just like the liar’s paradox – I understood that the liar’s paradox is defined as follows: Every time something is a contradiction to itself, that if it exists/is true, it can no longer exist/be true.
My question is, is there an addition here or is it simply the paradox in a different form?
This is not related to the Liar Paradox. It’s a different paradox with the same logical structure. You can read about the Liar Paradox on Wikipedia.
thanks. I did read on Wikipedia. (In the English Wikipedia there is a list of paradoxes, one category of logical paradoxes is SELF-REFERENCE paradoxes and the logical structure you mentioned is described as the following: "These paradoxes have in common a contradiction arising from either self-reference or circular reference, in which several statements refer to each other in a way that following some of the references leads back to the starting point" So the liar paradox is ‘Self-reference’ and the paradox I proposed is ‘circular reference’.
It's what I wrote. It's not the liar's paradox, but it has the same logical structure (it belongs to the same type: self-reference). I think if you search here you'll find columns about it.
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