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Subject:Re: weekend recreation From:mpriestley -at- VNET -dot- IBM -dot- COM Date:Tue, 9 Aug 1994 18:51:59 EDT
Matt Hicks wrote:
>> |-----------------------------------|
>> | The sentence in the box is false. |
>> |-----------------------------------|
...
>Actually, the sentence in the box doesn't postulate anything, so it is
>neither true nor false; it just isn't a very good sentence.
I thought it postulated that it was false. That's certainly postulating
something. Nor does its self-referentiality invalidate it. If the
statement "I'm having a good day" can be true or false, why can't "I'm
lying"?
I think it's a perfectly good sentence. It's logic that has the problem.
And if we were all perfectly logical beings, that sentence in a box would
have given us all a brain virus, and we'd still be spinning our mental
wheels while the cockroaches took over the world... :-/
In a desperate attempt to justify this post as relevant to technical writing:
it seems to me that computer programmers have it easy. If you stick an
endless loop in a program, it rapidly becomes apparent as the system hangs.
If you stick an endless loop in the docs, though, you may never find out,
because the user probably thinks it makes sense. |-(
Later,
Michael Priestley
mpriestley -at- vnet -dot- ibm -dot- com
