from the Nilsens

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PARADOX
by Don L. F. Nilsen
and Alleen Pace Nilsen

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• A newspaper story under the headline
“Texas in Catch-22” told about a Texas state
law forbidding the execution of anyone
insane.
• A prisoner on death row refused to take the
medication that would keep him sane.
• This is the kind of irony illustrated by many
urban legends and contemporary novels,
films, and plays.

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GILBERT AND SULLIVAN
• 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!

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GREEK PHILOSOPHERS
• The Greek philosophers often wrestled with
paradoxes.
• The most famous was credited to the Cretan
philosopher Epimenides: “All Cretans are
liars.”
• Epimenides was a Cretan. Therefore, If he is
lying, then the statement must be true. But if
the statement is true, he must be lying.

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PARADOX VS.
CONTRADICTION
• Paradoxes are statements that seem contradictory,
unbelievable, or absurd, but in some sense are
nevertheless true.
• Because paradoxes highlight breakdowns in our
expectations of a logical universe, they are sources
of both delight and consternation as the human
mind works to figure out how people can in good
faith talk about a “large mouse” running between the
legs of a “small elephant” or can make sense out of
the Yiddish curse, “He should drop dead, God
forbid!”

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PARADOXES AND PARADIGM
SHIFTS
• Whenever a paradigm shift occurs in a
culture there are many paradoxes, because
two social systems are competing with each
other (the old one and the new one).
• The paradox can be part of both of these
systems.

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SCIENCE FICTION
• Paradoxes are explorations of philosophy,
logic and social criticism.
• They are a verbal means of acknowledging
real world conditions and frustrations.
• When put into “other” worlds (science fiction
or fantasy), paradoxes can be even more
intriguing.

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• For example, the “grandfather paradox” in
science fiction is a variation on the plot
technique in which a time-traveler goes back
and murders his own grandfather before the
time-traveler’s parent was born.
• This is a brain teaser because if the
grandfather were prematurely killed then the
grandchild couldn’t have been born and
wouldn’t have been able to go back and
commit the murder.

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SIGNIFICANT PARADOXES FROM THE
16TH
CENTURY TO THE 20TH
CENTURY
• Sits he on ever so high a throne, a man still
sits on his bottom. (Michel Elyquem de
Montaigne, 1533-1592)
• We have just enough religion to make us
hate, but not enough to make us love one
another. (Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745)

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• I laugh, so that I may not cry. (Pierre
Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais,
1732-1799)
• When a feller says, “It hain’t th’ money,
but th’ principle o’ th’ thing,” it’s the
money. (Josh Billings [pseudonym for
Henry Wheeler Shaw], 1818-1885)
• Nowadays people know the price of
everything and the value of nothing.
(Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900)

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• The vital question today is not whether
there will be life after death, but
whether there was life before death.
(Marshall McLuhan, 1911-1990)
• When I grow up I want to be a little boy.
(Joseph Heller, 1923-1999)

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Visual Paradox

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28. “Paradox Song” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WTSlr_WRgo
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