The word "paradox" should not be taken literally : real paradoxes are impossible

I'm afraid I bookmarked this for later viewing without recording who +1'd it.

Originally shared by John Wehrle

The word 'paradox' causes widespread confusion. It seems like the general expectation is that paradoxes are physical or mathematical impossibilities that somehow break reality. This is not an accurate understanding of 'paradox' and the key to understanding why is the suffix 'dox' - which is the same 'dox' as in orthodoxy - which means belief or idea or opinion.(1) That is paradoxes are about us and our attempts to understand reality. Paradoxes cannot break reality.

There's also the expectation that paradoxes cannot ever be solved. This is just a limitation of imagination. First, not all paradoxes are unsolved problems. Some are just describing extremely persistent epistemic or perceptual expectations that just so happen to be false or misleading. There aren't solutions for them because they aren't problems to be solved.

Of course, some paradoxes are problems for which we might really like to have solutions. And we call these problems paradoxes because finding solutions to these problems is really, really hard - much harder than normal problems. But that doesn't mean they won't ever have solutions or that it is impossible for them to be solved. It just means we haven't yet and they're such tough problems that we've ascribed super-star status to them.

Anyway, Kevin Lieber of Vsauce2 does a great job of describing how paradoxes actually work. I highly recommend it.

I may have gone off on a tangent here.

1. Or, to prevent the inevitable confusion those words will cause, That Mental State In Which We Ascribe A Property or Properties to Reality. People get entirely too hung up on the words 'belief' and 'opinion'. For our purposes, please refrain from infusing them with extra meaning. In the context of philosophy in general and epistemology, in particular, a belief is just a mental attitude of a certain type. Imagine that there's a symbolism for statements uttered or thought with the attitude that 'this is true'; Ɓ. So we would have Ɓ(Grass is green) is a belief. Knowing is standardly defined as 'true, justified, belief' and this means that all knowledge is by definition belief. So if we added more symbols, you might say, Ƙ = Ɓ{, , }. If you know something, you must also believe it - by definition. To believe something DOES NOT mean that it is unknown or unknowable. That is a poetic way of speaking that gets so many people into so many pointless arguments that it's frankly infuriating and depressing to every living philosopher.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJzSzGbfc0k