BREAK: Alfred White Northhead actually said that?!
Today's "quote of the day", apparently by Alfred White Northhead:
"There are no whole truths; all truths are half- truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."
Unbelievable! If this statement is really true, i.e., it is a whole truth, then it follows (if it is indeed a whole truth) that this statement is NOT a whole truth. In other words, the logical implications of it being really true are that it is NOT really true. Thus, this kind of self-referentially inconsistent statement cannot be true. It can only be false.
My previous impressions of Northhead were that he was a smart logician, co-author (with the more famous Bertrand Russell) of Principia Mathematica. Amazing how he could have said this, presumably in all seriousness.
ps. Unlike some more powerful blogging platforms, blogspot doesn't allow "categories", so until I transition to a better blogging platform, I may put the word "BREAK" in the title of certain posts to indicate I'm taking a time-out from the normal entries in this blog and doing something different.
"There are no whole truths; all truths are half- truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil."
Unbelievable! If this statement is really true, i.e., it is a whole truth, then it follows (if it is indeed a whole truth) that this statement is NOT a whole truth. In other words, the logical implications of it being really true are that it is NOT really true. Thus, this kind of self-referentially inconsistent statement cannot be true. It can only be false.
My previous impressions of Northhead were that he was a smart logician, co-author (with the more famous Bertrand Russell) of Principia Mathematica. Amazing how he could have said this, presumably in all seriousness.
ps. Unlike some more powerful blogging platforms, blogspot doesn't allow "categories", so until I transition to a better blogging platform, I may put the word "BREAK" in the title of certain posts to indicate I'm taking a time-out from the normal entries in this blog and doing something different.
posted by the deLicious Word | 12:49 AM
2 Comments:
Ok, if you make an exception for that one statement, then by definition of exception, you are saying that that one statement IS a whole truth (otherwise it wouldn't qualify as an exception and would be a half truth like everything else).
But now you would be contradicting yourself to say that statement is itself "now not a whole (100%) truth".
In any case, if you go down the slippery road of making exceptions, then the statement loses a lot of its shine.
It appears people are confounding statement with truth. The quote itself is not a "truth" in the sense of the "truth" Whitehead uses in the statement. It is true that a statement is an assertion which may or may not be true. His statement's truth is not the same meaning of "truth" of that which he used in the statement. It's a little more nuanced than what the first blogger stated.
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