The following is an exerpt from Michael Bruce’s ‘Just the Arguments’ (underlines aren’t kosher on tumblr?!) …
Everything I Say Is False
“Everything I say Is False”
This was a writing prompt that blew my mind as an undergrad philosophy major. There are two common reactions to dealing with a statement like this. There is the “there is something wrong here” camp and the “I’m in on the joke” camp. As a greenhorn philosophy student, I took the bait, drank the Kool-Aid, and tried to understand what was going on. It turned into one of the most exciting and fruitful intellectual adventures of my life. This loaded prompt was an entry to a mind-bending investigation that exposed me to some of my favorite and most fascinating philosophical insights. This is the first of three blog posts detailing how these words led me to: meaningful nonsense and the philosophy of language, incompleteness theorems and Alice and Wonderland, Zen and quantum theory.
(A quick note to the reader/philosophy students: if you aren’t tripping out on ideas you’re learning in class (or out), philosophy isn’t for you, my friend. Philosophy is the love of wisdom, not the love of theory, so you should be experiencing a good mind-F every once in a while. The following was one of mine.)
Part 1 — Meaningful nonsense: the complicated easy way out
“Everything I say is false.”
At one level, it looks like a regular sentence. There is a subject and a verb and all of that business. At another level, the content of the sentence is saying something about the same sentence (itself). The trouble, of course, is that the sentence is declaring itself to be false. So, what do we take to be true? If everything “they” say is false, then the statement “Everything I say is false” is false, but then would it actually make the statement true? But if the statement is accurate (true), then we have a true statement saying it isn’t true. This is when your head should start hurting a little. It is a classic form vs. content, self-reflexive paradox, and one approach to solving this riddle comes via the sub-genre of the philosophy of language, particularly drawing from its 20th century demigod, Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In his first magnum opus, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one of Wittgenstein’s (Vit-gehn-sht-eye-hn) Wittgenstein’s main projects in this slim volume was what kinds of things make sense to talk about. It seemed that philosophy thus far had tied itself in knots with language and that problems of language were taken as metaphysical problems of the world. He wrote that what can be said can be said clearly and that what cannot be said must be “passed over in silence.” Only things that can be either true or false (have a truth value) can make sense; contradictions and tautologies are senseless; and then there are propositions (statements that have truth value) that transcend the boundary of sense and are nonsense.
So, the question then becomes which kind of thing is “Everything I say is false.”Does this sentence have sense like ‘The knife is on the table’ (either it is true or false)? Or is it a contradiction or tautology (a statement that tells us nothing because they are always true or always false and therefore do not help us sort anything out)? Or is it nonsense (a violation of logical grammar that shows unspeakable truth about the world)?
There are abundant interpretations of this early work. A philosopher could write a Ph. D. thesis on any random page of Wittgenstein—it is a significant philosophical specialty. The author, according to one body of interpretation, saw his own work as nonsense; Wittgenstein writes near the end of the Tractatus:
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
As a student, this approach was a revelation. It made me look closely at every sentence - in a philosophy text or walking down the street - with a discriminating eye: sense, senseless, or nonsense? It was a way to understand the multifaceted way language and reality create each other, engender metaphysical—ethical—aesthetic problems, and how there is the “mystical” beyond the limits of language that could still be meaningfully shown.
What do you think? Is “Everything I say is false” sensical, senseless, or nonsense? What other statements are like this (in any of those ways)?
Thanks, http://justthearguments.com/
