Exploring paradoxes: Untangling the Pinocchio’s paradox
We all know and love Pinocchio, don’t we? Walt Disney’s Pinocchio was a great form of entertainment for the kid me. I also have great memories about the adventures of Pinocchio and his insect friend, Jiminy Cricket.
Though for those who haven’t heard of or don’t know who Pinocchio is, let me give you a small brief. The story of Pinocchio(the Walt Disney Pinocchio rather then the original Pinocchio)is about a lonely old man named Geppetto and his wish to make his wood puppet come to life. A fairy grants Geppetto his wish and Pinocchio comes to life. Though there was one thing different about Pinocchio compared to your everyday living wood puppet, which was his nose grew each time he spoke a lie.
The paradox:
Now then my readers, I have a small question for you regarding Pinocchio. So one day roaming around a forest, Pinocchio wonders and says out loud “My nose will grow now”. Now then lovely readers what you have to do is determine whether Pinocchio’s nose will grow or not.
Have you decided upon your answer? So then is the answer “it will grow” or “it won’t grow”? Well, you might find it surprising to know but that answer is actually…..unknown. “Wait what? Why?” might be what you’re wondering right now so let us go through this situation in depth to see what exactly the answer is.
Let’s say that the statement Pinocchio said is true and therefore according to the statement Pinocchio’s nose should grow. Though when Pinocchio speaks the truth his nose doesn’t grow. Therefore Pinocchio’s nose grows and doesn’t grow, huh? This makes a contradiction to the true of the statement and therefore this can’t be true.
Well then that is easy, right? If it isn’t true it has to be false, well no. Now let’s say that what Pinocchio said was a lie and therefore according to the statement though his nose wouldn’t grow. Though as Pinocchio’s nose grows when he lies, his nose would grow. Therefore all over again Pinocchio’s nose would grow and won’t grow and therefore it creates a contradiction again.
So if both possibilities are contradictions, then what is the answer? The answer is unknown and statements such as these are what we know as paradoxes. Paradoxes are basically a statement that contradicts their own selves . Such as in this paradox crowned as Pinocchio’s paradox, Pinocchio’s nose has to grow and doesn’t have to grow at the same time making a contradiction.
History of Pinocchio’s Paradox:
Talking about Pinocchios Paradox, let me give you a small brief as to the history of this paradox. Pinocchio’s paradox is a paradox proposed by Veronique-Eldridge-Smith at 11 years old in February 2001. The idea of this came to Veronique when her father, Peter-Eldridge-Smith explained the liar paradox to her and her older brother. Her father then told the siblings to come up with their own version of the paradox.
In a few minutes, Veronique came up with the idea of Pinocchio’s paradox and informed her father – Peter-Eldridge-Smith – who specialized in philosophy of logic liked that formulation and wrote an article on it. This article was published in the journal, analysis and was further popularized by the Internet.
What exactly are paradoxes and how they are solved:
Before we start with the various “solutions” of the Pinocchio’s Paradox, let me explain to you what exactly paradoxes are and how people understand them. In logic(which is a subfield of philosophy)a paradox is like a tricky puzzle which just can’t be solved in a “neat” manner using a simple “true” or “false” answer. This neat manner I am talking about is commonly known as two-valued logic.
We use two-valued logic every day. We can consider two-valued logic as a light switch which is either on or off, or being the truth or being false. Such as when I say “13 + 46 = 69” you can imagine the switch to be switched on as the statement is true. When I say “all chocolate is black” the switch turns off because my statement is a lie.
Though when it comes to paradoxes problems occur. If we were to try to make sense of the paradox we just discussed, Pinocchio’s paradox things get much trickier. If we try to assign a truth value to Pinocchio’s paradox, we end up in a loop as we saw. If it’s false, then it’s true, if it’s true, then it’s false again and then it keeps going forever. That means this so-called statement just denies the laws of two-valued logic because according to two-value logic each statement has to have one clear truth value.
To solve this problem, many experts came up with a different type of logic system called a multi-valued system or fuzzy logic. Instead of two truth values, fuzzy logic introduces a third truth value called neither-true-nor-false. This allows us to handle paradoxes by saying that a few statements can’t be “neatly” assigned a simple true or false value.
So these solutions I am going to be listing down won’t give you a “neat” and simple answer such as true or false but most of them use creative means or think out of the box to make it possible.
Solutions:
One possible way to solve Pinocchio’s paradox is by saying that what Pinocchio stated was not a lie but a false prediction of the future. To give an example, if I said I would find an expensive 24-carat diamond on the floor, instead of it being a lie I am just falsely predicting the future similar to how Pinocchio was falsely predicting the future hence Pinocchio’s nose shouldn’t grow.
Another way to solve Pinocchio’s paradox is by questioning how Pinocchio’s nose works, so let’s say there are two possible ways. One is that the nose decides upon the intent of Pinocchio so if he thinks he is lying the nose will grow and vice versa. So if Pinocchio’s nose mechanism works on Pinocchio’s intent then the answer would be simple, it would be based on what Pinocchio is thinking.
Though if we were to flip it and say that Pinocchio’s nose mechanism grew or didn’t grow on the objective truth then well again a lot of problems would occur. First of all, Pinocchio would be omniscient and he could see the future or past by speaking statements like “I will die in the year 3000” and he could decipher the answer based on if his nose grew or not.
This would add many more paradoxes to the already existing Pinocchio paradox. So therefore there are two options as to how his nose mechanism works: either it makes him omniscient and makes the paradox into a larger one or completely destroys the paradox.
There are many-many-many more “possible” solutions for the Pinocchio’s paradox yet after going through many I have come to a conclusion that this has the highest feasiblity to be accurate. The solution stated: Pinocchio would explode…yea I am not kidding. Well actually I am because comapred to other more logical answers this seems quite the dumb one. Though you can’t deny the fact that there isn’t a possibility this is true.
Well then that’s it for Pinocchio’s paradox, though did you know that Pinocchios paradox is actually just a version of a very famous paradox known as the liar paradox. Well obviously you know I mentioned it once in the history of Pinocchio’s paradox. Or did I? So then I would love to explain the Liar’s paradox here in this blog, though I feel like you might have to wait for the next blog. So until then goodbye!
