Russell's paradoxIn mathematical logic, Russell's paradox (also known as Russell's antinomy) is a set-theoretic paradox published by the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell in 1901. Russell's paradox shows that every set theory that contains an unrestricted comprehension principle leads to contradictions. The paradox had already been discovered independently in 1899 by the German mathematician Ernst Zermelo. However, Zermelo did not publish the idea, which remained known only to David Hilbert, Edmund Husserl, and other academics at the University of Göttingen.
Principle of explosionIn classical logic, intuitionistic logic and similar logical systems, the principle of explosion (ex falso [sequitur] quodlibet, 'from falsehood, anything [follows]'; or ex contradictione [sequitur] quodlibet), or the principle of Pseudo-Scotus (falsely attributed to Duns Scotus), is the law according to which any statement can be proven from a contradiction. That is, from a contradiction, any proposition (including its negation) can be inferred from it; this is known as deductive explosion.
Principle of bivalenceIn logic, the semantic principle (or law) of bivalence states that every declarative sentence expressing a proposition (of a theory under inspection) has exactly one truth value, either true or false. A logic satisfying this principle is called a two-valued logic or bivalent logic. In formal logic, the principle of bivalence becomes a property that a semantics may or may not possess. It is not the same as the law of excluded middle, however, and a semantics may satisfy that law without being bivalent.
ContradictionIn traditional logic, a contradiction occurs when a proposition conflicts either with itself or established fact. It is often used as a tool to detect disingenuous beliefs and bias. Illustrating a general tendency in applied logic, Aristotle's law of noncontradiction states that "It is impossible that the same thing can at the same time both belong and not belong to the same object and in the same respect.
Graham PriestGraham Priest (born 1948) is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a regular visitor at the University of Melbourne, where he was Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy and also at the University of St Andrews. Priest was educated at St John's College, Cambridge and the London School of Economics. His thesis advisor was John Lane Bell. He also holds a DLitt from the University of Melbourne.
Tarski's undefinability theoremTarski's undefinability theorem, stated and proved by Alfred Tarski in 1933, is an important limitative result in mathematical logic, the foundations of mathematics, and in formal semantics. Informally, the theorem states that "arithmetical truth cannot be defined in arithmetic". The theorem applies more generally to any sufficiently strong formal system, showing that truth in the standard model of the system cannot be defined within the system.
Curry's paradoxCurry's paradox is a paradox in which an arbitrary claim F is proved from the mere existence of a sentence C that says of itself "If C, then F", requiring only a few apparently innocuous logical deduction rules. Since F is arbitrary, any logic having these rules allows one to prove everything. The paradox may be expressed in natural language and in various logics, including certain forms of set theory, lambda calculus, and combinatory logic. The paradox is named after the logician Haskell Curry.
TrivialismTrivialism is the logical theory that all statements (also known as propositions) are true and that all contradictions of the form "p and not p" (e.g. the ball is red and not red) are true. In accordance with this, a trivialist is a person who believes everything is true. In classical logic, trivialism is in direct violation of Aristotle's law of noncontradiction. In philosophy, trivialism is considered by some to be the complete opposite of skepticism.
