Posts by Eric Bennett79

feralharbor2 said:Look, I wasn't trying to fix any mistakes you made. There was just a tiny slip-up in how you used the word "contradiction"—I didn't realize you were basing your analogy on a paradox rather than the actual validity of the initial statement, which is the whole point here (and it's right).
I was actually correcting mistyfox812, who was claiming your analogy didn't work. It does—provided you look at the core issue of whether the starting premise is semantically sound.

Wait, there are still good people left in the world 🙂 Nah, I'm just messing with you. I realized I nailed the main point, but I also saw where I tripped up when defining the statement I compared to your self-referential one. My logic was heading in the right direction, but yeah, there was an error there—even if it was minor and basically irrelevant.
I guess I'm just way too hard on myself about everything. But hey, being self-critical is a virtue. Or so I tell myself. 👍

feralharbor2 said:The analogy holds up—not because of some paradox, but because the starting premise itself is just broken.
The statement "this sentence is false" isn't flawed because it creates a paradox; the paradox is just the byproduct of trying to unpack a logic that was already nonsense from the jump due to being self-referential and empty.

So, there’s my (lack of) logic expertise. But hey, sometimes you gotta talk without knowing your stuff just so someone who actually does can tear your argument apart—that's how you spot the error and learn how to not screw up next time. I know newbies aren't exactly the most popular crowd on this forum, but damn, everyone has to start somewhere. 😬
Just a heads up: you don't need to reply to this. (And I know you won't anyway, but saying it makes me feel better—I can just tell myself you ignored me specifically because I told you not to. Still... 🙂 ) 🙂

I'm with Nem on this one—and I'll try to explain it my way, even if I'm mostly just echoing what feralharbor2 already laid out.

feralharbor2 said:I think you’re equating these two things based solely on a surface-level analogy of "cycles."
With Pi, you get repetitive digits, but the function isn't actually looping back on itself; it's moving forward, providing more precision for the value. That repetition has zero connection to semantic self-reference—or the "emptiness"—of the sentence we're talking about. Repetition here just refines a specific ratio (Pi is just the quantitative relationship between a radius and a circumference). That ratio *is* the content. So, semantic content exists, unlike in that self-referential sentence.
Maybe your confusion stems from the semantic gaps and occasional ambiguity in the language used during math operations. For instance, a "function" can sometimes refer to the resulting number and other times to the operation itself. This linguistic fuzziness is annoying for semantic purists like me, but hey, you can't fight tradition when people use it as a shorthand.

Let's look at it this way. Let's temporarily ignore the self-reference that led Eric Bennett79 😁 to compare a logically contradictory judgment to a recursive function.
Take a judgment like "It is true that three is five." — that’s a semantically meaningless, contradictory statement, and a logical contradiction precisely because "truth is defined by how a description corresponds to something external to it." That statement fails right out of the gate because three obviously isn't five; it's inherently contradictory from the start.
The same goes for the self-referential judgment "this sentence is false." It's contradictory from the jump, so there's no point in overanalyzing it—any conclusion we reach will just loop right back to that initial flaw.
Any contradictory judgment should be tossed out immediately.

Eric Bennett79 says: Functions themselves don't have an inherent "starting value"; they just describe a specific logical construction.
And it's crucial that they truly lack an initial "value," unlike semantically contradictory judgments which *do* have an initial "value"—namely, the fact that they are contradictory because their terms are placed in impossible relationships with reality.
The starting value for any function is derived by plugging in or calculating variables based on their relationship, where "repetition just refines a specific ratio (Pi is just the quantitative relationship between a radius and a circumference)." Basically, those variables are related without contradiction from the get-go. A recursive function might cycle, but it's always moving forward, whereas in self-referential judgments, the terms are contradictory from the start, causing the logic to constantly snap back to its own failure.