PARADOX
This PowerPoint begins with the Ambiguity Paradox: Everything is ambiguous; however, nothing is ambiguous.” Perhaps all words and sentences are ambiguous, if they are not seen or heard in the larger context. However, the larger context (both linguistic and non-linguistic) resolves almost all of the ambiguities--Except when the speaker is intentionally trying to be ambiguous, as with linguists and politicians.
Then we go on to discuss science fiction and the “grandfather paradox,” and the building which is larger on the inside than the outside, and some “Catch-22 paradoxes,” some visual paradox, and many other paradoxes from the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries as expressed by Montaigne, Beaumarchais, Josh Billings, Henry Wheeler Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Marshall McLuhan, Joseph Heller, Gilbert and Sullivan, and others.
Gilbert and Sullivan often relied on paradox for comic effect. In The Pirates of Penzance, they composed a song about paradoxes:
How quaint the ways of paradox!
At common sense she gaily mocks!
A paradox, a paradox,
A most ingenious paradox!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!
Poor Fredrick was to be the apprentice on a pilate ship until he was 21. But, by mistake, he became the apprentice on a pirate ship until he was 21.
But he was born on February 29th in a leap year, so he was only five birthdays old. For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal, Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, Twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty, One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty.
Through some singular coincidence—I shouldn’t be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy—You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, On the twenty-ninth of February.’ And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you’ll easily discover, That though you’ve lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays, You’re only five and a little bit over!
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!
Don L. F. Nilsen --- Don, It is true if you also assume there are distinct differences among our ideas. The other possibility "its all the same". In a way we form separations to study paradoxes. But without our desire to see separate parts the distinct differences disappear and we "see" the whole. - And, paradox (one of the academic "games" we love to play) is not apparent.
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