"This is a lie"

October 28 · 3 mins read

About four weeks before my talk for DevCon Davao 2017 last October 7, I started reading the “Rough Cuts” of Uncle Bob Martin’s book “Clean Architecture: A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design” available at Safari Books Online. (I thought to myself that I might find gems in it I can use to answer questions that might be thrown at me during the talk! :smile:)

The book was very good. Some blurry concepts, which I read in Uncle Bob’s blog and heard in his talks, were cleared to me.

But in chapter four of the book, Uncle Bob said this:

Of course, not all statements are provable. The statement: “This is a lie.” is neither true nor false. It is one of the simplest examples of a statement that is not provable.

I was skeptical about that.

Unprovable?

Neither true nor false?

That statement sounds like it must either be true or false to me!

I am a big fan of Uncle Bob. I am inclined to believe almost everything that he says about programming and software development because I am inexperienced while he is very experienced. :smile: (That might be bad, I’m not sure… but I’m still learning.)

But because I knew that I have a different set of foundational biases than him, I am sometimes skeptical when he talks about things that do not seem to match with my biases or my worldview. (I believe that Uncle Bob will not be angry with a student who does not believe everything that he says :grin:)

So I tried googling about the “this is a lie” thing.

I found the article “Resolving the Liar’s Paradox” of Steve Patterson.

Ahh!

So that statement was supposed to be a what they call a paradox. (Please read his article if you want to know how the seeming paradox is resolved.)

I found this very interesting! In the article, Steve Patterson says this:

… it shouldn’t be surprising that the Liar’s Paradox can be resolved because all paradoxes, by their nature, can be resolved. They don’t exist because they can’t exist.

Hmmm… (More please…)

In “Paradox, Nonsense, and California”, he said this:

All paradoxes can be resolved. It’s just a matter of effort… Nothing in existence contradicts itself. It can not, by definition of what we mean by “contradict”. This understanding is fundamental for developing an accurate worldview.

Wow! I want to know more about what this thinker thinks and says…

In his start page, he said that he is creating an entire worldview.

Worldview!!!

I first heard that term from, Jason Lisle and Ken Ham, and then from Greg Bahnsen, and from many others like Albert Mohler

This makes me the more interested!

What could this new worldview be?

Would this new worldview explain things much better than Christianity does?

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