Is there a name, and a general form for the paradox demonstrated in the title of this thread? The best description-name I can come up with is the “You cannot truthfully assert to someone an exact statement that you will not make to them” paradox. The two places I see it come up most are comedy routines where an unintelligent character will say something like “Nope, I won’t tell you where Bill is, I promised him I’d never admit to you that he’d gone fishing.”, and in backhanded insults in real-life where someone will say something like “If I wasn’t such a courteous person I’d tell you that you’re a good-for-nothing waste of space.”
I’m not going to post a reponse to the OP.
I’m not going to link to the Liar paradox, since it may (or may not) be related.
You may be interested in Raymond Smullyan’s This Book Needs No Title, which muses on paradoxes of this sort. (He also has a similar book, whose name I can’t recall at the moment).
Bender: “And now, a man who needs no introduction!” (walks off podium)
(nothing happens)
Bender: “Fry, get up there!”
Huh. I followed the link to the Liar Paradox page on Wikipedia that Giles posted about not posting, and while it’s not clear if the paradox I’m talking about is an example of it, it does do a good job of showing why it’s a paradox: The paradox in question, rather than being a statement that paradoxically asserts its own falsehood, is a statement that contains evidence of its own falsehood. It’s like if Magritte wrote “This is not a pipe.” on a pipe.
It also keeps reminding me of a thread I remember here where someone asked how it could be an apology when someone said “I’d like to apologize to you.” The response was that it was something called a something like a “declarative act”- I’m probably remembering that wrong- like when a priest says “I now pronounce you man and wife.”
EDIT: Clearly I need to type faster Ludovic.
This is not a pipe. And it’s not. Neither is this
Oxymoron? Contradiction in terms?
I have read, I don’t know where, that ‘this is not a pipe’ was not just being cleverly funny because it clearly was a pipe, but also childishly funny because pipe is or was a common term for the penis. Maybe French-speaking dopers can confirm if this is true?
The term for statements such as ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ is not just declarative, because that’s a much broader term - ‘I’m going to post this in a minute’ is a declarative statement. ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’ actually makes that happen - it changes things merely by the matter of being said - depending on the laws where you live, and it has a special name all of its own, but it’s hidden in the back of my brain and won’t come out to play.
The object labelled “This is not a pipe” is, in fact, not a pipe: it is a picture of a pipe.
Yes, but I think it had an extra level - a subterranean level, perhaps, considering how low the humour is - as a play on a term for penis.
I’m not going to make a joke about minds being intentionally left blank.
(And I didn’t. I described the joke, or perhaps a category of jokes. You made the joke for yourself, assuming you found that funny.)
By giving the thread a title, you haven’t created a paradox-you have merely contradicted yourself.
Yeah, it wasn’t the best choice as a demonstration. “This Thread Has No Title” would have been better.
At the risk of making a second serious post in this thread, I believe the name of the book you are thinking of is What is the Name of This Book?
This sentence is false.
This sentance has three errers.
I know a joke. Somebody say, “knock knock.”