Moore’s paradox(Pictured: We tie knots in our minds from ourmisunderstandings of language, according

Moore’s paradox(Pictured: We tie knots in our minds from ourmisunderstandings of language, according to Wittgenstein. He wanted ‘to shewthe fly the way out of the fly-bottle’: liberate us from cases like Moore’sparadox by making language less ambiguous and more truth-apt.)Namedafter G.E. Moore, Moore’s paradox illustrates how it may be possible to make logicallyvalid statements containing contradictory beliefs. To borrow Moore’s ownexample, ‘It is raining but I do not believe it is raining’: ‘P and Ibelieve not-P’. Intuitively, this seems bizarre! How is that statementvalid?!Beliefisn’t a simple statement of facts. The paradox rests on there being a genuinebelief about the world (it’s an epistemic paradox). It arises fromyour believing something in contradiction to what you just said.Mooresuggested that the solution is to say P isn’t an assertion butan implication: it’s not contradictory to undermine only animplication. However, fellow analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was greatlyinfluenced by this paradox, offered a different take.Heblamed language in the first-person point of view for the source of Moore’sparadox, which doesn’t arise in the third person (‘It is raining but she doesnot believe it is’) or past tense (‘It was raining but I did not believe it was’).Wittgensteinthus called for clarification of the expression ‘I believe’, arguing that itisn’t intelligible: things are either true or they’re not. In Philosophical Investigations he writes:‘How did we ever come to use such anexpression as “I believe … ”? … Did we observe ourselves and otherpeople and so discover belief?’Hence‘I believe’ is really just equivalent to ‘This is the case’. Thus ‘P’and ‘I believe not-P’ are just two propositions of the same kind which do contradict each other, dispelling an unavoidable paradox.Belief, true or false, is usually taken to be meaningful: it’s matched up against some kind of objectivity (e.g. through justification). This undermines Wittgenstein’s view that false beliefs aren’t possible. But, when we lift all of our pride about it, can we say such objectivity exists? Wittgenstein’s own version of truth is ‘deflationary’. For him, truth has no explicit meaning (e.g. it’s not verifiable). Rather, it is implicitly fixed to its own conditions for being true, making it superficial and expressive.Butisn’t it radical for Wittgenstein to deny the meaning of ‘I believe’? Wementally report on what we think to be true every day … Eitherway, feel free to ignore Ludwig’s advice and commit Moore’s paradox.Willyou?Youwill and I believe you won’t. -- source link

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