“Everything i say is a lie.” is the same as “I always lie”. They both mean that statements you make are lies. But the statements are about you, not about the statement itself.
“Everything I say is a lie” is not at all contradictory. Either you never lie, you sometimes lie, or you always lie. If we assume you never lie, saying “Everything I say is a lie” is contradictory. If we assume you always lie, saying “Everything I say is a lie” is also contradictory, since the statement would have been truthful, but it cannot be under the assumption everything you say is a lie. But if we assume you sometimes lie, “Everything I say is a lie” is itself a lie, since not everything you say is a lie, but it still is consistent in the model where you sometimes lie. Therefore from the statement we can conclude that you sometimes lie, and the statement itself is a lie. Under this model everything is consistent, there is no contradiction.
“This statement is a lie” is self-referencial and there does not exist a consistent interpretation. Either the statement is a lie or it is not a lie, but either way it is not consistent.
but it is. id you say “everything i say is a lie” then it contradicts itsself. If everything you say is a lie, then that statement would be a lie, meaning that everything you say is truth, but, if everything you say is the truth, then by saying “everything i say is a lie” you contradict this lie.
Did you not pay attention to what Vorpy said, Beasty? You’re falling into the fallacy of deceptive alternatives.
“Everything I say is a lie” is not at all contradictory. Either you never lie, you sometimes lie, or you always lie. If we assume you never lie, saying “Everything I say is a lie” is contradictory. If we assume you always lie, saying “Everything I say is a lie” is also contradictory, since the statement would have been truthful, but it cannot be under the assumption everything you say is a lie. But if we assume you sometimes lie, “Everything I say is a lie” is itself a lie, since not everything you say is a lie, but it still is consistent in the model where you sometimes lie. Therefore from the statement we can conclude that you sometimes lie, and the statement itself is a lie. Under this model everything is consistent, there is no contradiction.
It’s like I said before, if “Everything I say is a lie” is a lie, then the truthful statement would be “Not everything I say is a lie”. In other words, only some of the statements one makes are lies.
This just means that you sometimes lie. The first statement is a lie, the second statement is not a lie, and you sometimes lie.
I always lie.
The above statement is true.
Same thing. You sometimes lie. Except in this case both statements are lies.
I’m not sure if it is even possible to make a contradiction out of the statement “I always lie” since its consistent interpretation of “you sometimes lie” allows for your statements to arbitrarily be either truthful or lies.
“My next statement is the truth”
“The preceding statement is a lie”
of course those statements refer to themselves, not to their source…
Yes it is. By saying you always lie, you immediately negate the sentence “I always lie” because always is completely all-inclusive. Everything is a lie, meaning that sentence isn’t true. So something of a lesser extent must be true.
No you don’t. You’re limiting yourself to two alternatives. You either always lie, never lie, or sometimes lie. Always lying and never lying can’t be true as Vorpy explained. So, that means you must sometimes lie. It’s not a paradoxical statement.
So what if we know he always lies (though he never made the first statement), and still says he’s lieing? Would that be impossible or actually just be the truth and thus nothing but the opposite?
There’s a non-cannonical episode of Samurai Jack where he faces a two-headed snake which gives him a riddle: Being eaten by one of the heads will take him to where he needs to go; the other head will simply digest him.
He can ask a question of one of the two heads with the knowledge that one head lies and the other tells him the truth. So he asks one of the heads “What would the other head say if I asked him which head I should have eat me,” which actually is the correct response to the riddle.
Unfortunately when he gets eaten by the snake, it turns out both the fuckers were lying and both heads just send him to the stomach.
The point is that many of the paradoxes that occur within wordplay like pierson’s example work only because people limit themselves to a certain ruleset implied by the statements. If you realize that the implied ruleset doesn’t actually prevent you from having alternate conditions, then a median arises which allows both statements to be true and thus negates the paradox.
So pierson doesn’t either lie all the time or never; he only lies sometimes. This is the alternate condition which isn’t implied by the statements, but allows them to be true.
OK, DragonTear’s most recent post has an interesting question, because we already know that the person always lies, and yet if they say they always lie, that would be the truth except it negates the fact that we know they always lie. But how do we know that he always lies? If we take that he always lies to be axiomatic, then our system of logic is obviously flawed since we’ve arrived at a paradox.
A statement can be either true or false (or possibly true). A true statement reflects reality. A false statement does not. A statement that is niether true nor false is either a paradox or outside of the domain of discourse (possibly true?). We need to make certain assumptions or else we can’t reason about anything. If those assumptions lead to paradoxes, then the assumptions were wrong. Even saying that statements can be true, false, (or unknown, or possibly true), is something of an assumption.
Green Mage, i remember that riddle, only when i heard it, it was about a man on a quest, and it was a door to life/death, and the guys were guards. I also heard another riddle, that is a “trick” riddle, because the wording went.
one guard says “One of us tells only lies” and the other says “One of us tells only truth”.
With that one, I believe that both lie, if you’re only going for absolutes. Otherwise, again, they could sometimes lie, and be lying there. It’s tough to come up with a working paradox.