The 5 second I.Q. Test...See how you do (1 Viewer)

[Brad Porter]

AAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!

The following sentence is false.
The preceding sentence is true.

Brad

 

[Van Patton]

Maybe I'm dumb but I do not understand any of this.

 

[Chuck C]

read this sentence.

 

[NickSo]

read this sentence.

Oooo Kay.... now what?

 

[andrew markworthy]

The following sentence is false.
The preceding sentence is true.

If the first sentence is valid, then the second sentence is invalid. The second sentence in itself says that the first sentence is valid, which seems to verify the first sentence's accuracy. But the first sentence says that the second sentence is invalid in its argument. Hence, the second sentence denies the accuracy of the first. Thus, the traditional answer is that two sentences contradict each other when taken in conjunciton.

You can attempt to get round this by arguing that perhaps 'true' and 'false' in this case can have shades of meaning (e.g. 'false' means 'inaccurate' rather than 'utterly wrong') but this is stretching things.

The only way I've found to get out of the problem is to say that 'true' in the second sentence simply refers to the text being correctly aligned on the page, rather than referring to veracity of an argument.

Thus:

The following sentence is false.
The preceding sentence is correctly aligned on the page.

This might get a tolerant smile from a tutor in Logic 101 but unfortunately doesn't really cut the mustard (especially when you recast the problem in formal logic, where there's no room for messing around with semantics).

 

[Jeremy Stockwell]

A variation:

This sentence does not have seven words.

JKS

 

[Van Patton]

A variation:
This post is really dumb and pointless.
The above post is true.

 

[Brad Porter]

The only way I've found to get out of the problem is to say that 'true' in the second sentence simply refers to the text being correctly aligned on the page, rather than referring to veracity of an argument.

Very well then...

The following sentence is a lie.
The preceding sentence is the truth.

How about this one:

You are not reading this sentence.

It's almost always true, like right now for example.

Brad