Thursday, September 14, 2006

paradoxes

are there purely syntactical paradoxes .. as in every paradox i know of seems to arise from semantics of the statements .. can there be something paradoxical within the realms of syntax without associating semantics

2 comments:

madatadam said...

dont understand this one - arent paradoxes about self-contradiction and to contradict something, there has to be meaning involved and semantics is what analyses meaning so there has to be some amount of semantics in any paradox(in fact the paradox being exclusively abt meaning, its cause might be actually purely semantic) - the syntax of any language, even if it does yield a paradox by itself, has to lead to it thru' semantics i feel
however google(yet again!) turned up a few supposedly 'syntactic paradoxes' including the knowability paradox, which on first glance doesnt seem to me purely syntactic..

nice try said...

i agree .. intuitively it does seem that semantics is a pre-req for a paradox .. but something like "inexpressibility" seems more fundamentally syntactic than semantic

and my sense was that there ought to be syntactical paradoxes too ..