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p.3 The word "paradox" derives from the Greek para (beyond) and doxa (belief): a paradox is literally a contention or group of contentions that is incredible - beyond belief. In the root sense of the term, paradoxes are thus a matter of far-fetched opinions
p.5 Sebastian Franck (1499-1542) published in 1534 his book Paradoxa, a collection of 280 "paradoxes" culled from biblical texts.
p.6 In the common usage of everyday discourse a paradox is a judgment or opinion that is contrary to the general opinion or "common sense." ...a variant but equivalent way of defining the term is by specifying that a paradox arises when a set of individually plausible propositions is collectively inconsistent. And the inconsistency at issue here must be real rather than merely seeming.
p.7 Paradoxes thus arise when we have a plurality of theses, each individually plausible in the circumstances, but nevertheless in the aggregate constituting an inconsistent group.
p.9 Since paradoxes arise through a clash or conflict among our commitments, they are the product of cognitive overcommitment. We regard more as plausible than the realm of fact and reality is able to accommodate.
p.9 The prime directive of rationality is to restore consistency in such situations. To be sure, it is a possible reaction to paradox simply to take contradictions in our stride.
[JLJ - Too much Star Trek, Mr. Rescher - the prime directive of rationality should be to understand the situation at hand - the current predicament - in enough detail in order to 'go on' or position oneself within it, and in addition, to be able to plan ahead in order to 'go on' within future predicaments, by developing certain capacities or potentials, which can later be leveraged. In my opinion, if the problem is a paradox, can we not just ignore the situation completely? If the paradox does not impact our ability to 'go on,' in the current predicament, then why worry about it? Equivalently, why would you worry about a spoon in a glass of water that appears bent at the air-water interface?]
p.10 Yet once consistency is lost, how is it to be regained? Any and every paradox can be resolved by simply abandoning some or all of the commitments whose conjoining creates a contradiction.
p.26 Paradox solution is in general a matter of bringing consistency to an inconsistent set of propositions... given the conflict among the propositions involved in an aporetic situation, it is clear that they cannot all be true... And so when confronted with an aporetic situation there is really only one way out: some of the theses that engender the conflict must be abandoned - if only by way of restriction or qualification.
p.30 "Paradoxes," one student of the subject writes, "are self-enclosed statements with no external reference point from which to take bearings upon the paradox itself." And this is true enough. For those paradoxical inconsistencies themselves afford no resources for their resolution - mere logical analysis of their assertoric content is no way out. To resolve paradoxes we need an external vantage point - a means for assessing the cognitive viability of the mutually incompatible theses that are involved, something about which those propositions themselves do not inform us.
[JLJ - Yes, which is why they can safely be ignored. They reflect, if anything, the mind's preoccupation with shortcuts over strict logic, in order to reduce the situation in front of us to to a category from which we can act. But the paradox exists as an artifact of the story it is created from. Tell the story another way, and perhaps the paradox can be avoided. We humans are suckers for stories - briefly or for as long as they catch and hold our attention - we easily treat them on equal footing with the real.]
p.43 The simplest way to eliminate an aporetic paradox is to determine that one or another of its essential premisses is flat-out untenable by way of being either meaningless or false.
p.43 "Yellow weighs wooden tentacles"... "He drew a square circle"... "This sentence is false"
[JLJ - You see how we can be puzzled by things - anything at all - that catch our attention, but only as long as they hold our attention - then we are no longer puzzled.]
p.51 Plausibility is one of our guides to paradox resolution... Clearly the more plausible a thesis is, the greater the price of its abandonment.... plausibility, in the sense of systemic fit... is our measure of strength. Accordingly, the crux of paradox resolution lies in the Weakest Link Principle of breaking through the chain of inconsistency at the most vulnerable... comparative plausibility being our standard of vulnerability here.
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