Comment by omnicognate
4 years ago
Paradox isn't synonymous with contradiction. Some paradoxes are, or contain, logical contradictions (i.e. they effectively say both X and not X are true) but the term is much broader.
Some of the earliest paradoxes are Zeno's, and they were referred to by that term at the time. For example the paradox that an object that moves towards a point must first cover half the distance, and then half the remaining distance, then half of the remainder, etc. Since this is an infinite number of steps, Zeno playfully argued that motion is impossible. There's no logical contradiction there, just a way of pointing out something counterintuitive about reality and maths.
That's fair, the thing I'm looking for isn't quite a contradiction.
What I like about Zeno's motion based paradoxes is they have this aspect of "here's a reasonable model of motion, and here's the ridiculous result you get from it." There's clearly something wrong in the model, but working it out takes a while, you need someone to come around and invent series first.
After a little reading, I think I just like falsidical paradoxes and don't like veridical paradoxes.