Hintikka’s Paradox
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I’ve got lots more to post about bases, but right now I’m faced with a paradox - Hintikka’s Paradox, to be precise.
Hintikka’s Paradox comes from Deontic Logic, a form of Modal Logic. I first read about it in Raymond Smullyan’s “Alice in Puzzleland’ (a brilliant book about logic, and Alice in Wonderland, that is worth looking into.)
In the introduction to “… Puzzleland,” Smullyan describes Hintikaka’s Paradox this way:
“Is it proper to call morally wrong something a person cannot do? Hintikka has a notorious arguent designed to show it is wrong to try to do something impossible. There is now a large literature on this strange question…”
I’ve yet to encounter much of that literature, and boy, I have looked. I probably wouldn’t have understood most of it, anyway.
But it boils down to this, Hintikka’s Paradox implies that, “What is not possible is positively forbidden.”
It’s important not to approach this from a “common sense” frame of mind. Common sense is usually neither, and is often a disadvantage when approaching counter-intuitive material. So try to keep an open mind.
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Tags: deontic logic , Hintikkas Paradox , logic , modal logic
