‘Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him’ – Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

When I blithely offered to write a short article on paradox, I thought I knew what a paradox was. It was simply a statement that appeared to contradict itself. For instance, Oscar Wilde’s ‘I can resist anything except temptation’.

But little did I know what a complicated subject I was taking on. The Chambers Dictionary 2006 defines paradox as ‘something which is contrary to received conventional opinion; something which is apparently absurd but is or may be really true; a self-contradictory statement’. So far, so good. But two statements which contradict each other are not a paradox; they are an antinomy.

The word ‘paradox’ comes from the Latin paradoxum, ‘a statement seemingly absurd yet really true,’ from Greek. paradoxon, ‘contrary to expectation, incredible’, from para ‘contrary to’ and doxa ‘opinion’. The ancient Greek word (paradoxos) means simply ‘unexpected, strange’.

But I learned from Wikipedia that paradox is just one of a class of non-false dilemmas, such as:
Chicken or the egg: a seemingly unbreakable cycle of causation, which has an unknown origin.
Cornelian dilemma: a choice between actions which will all have a detrimental effect on the chooser or on someone they care for.

Deadlock: in computing, when two commands reach a standstill or impasse; paradoxically waiting for the other to finish.

Double bind: a forced choice between two logically conflicting demands.

Hobson’s choice: the choice between taking an option or not taking it.

Lesser of two evils principle: a choice between two undesirable outcomes.

Morton’s Fork: a choice between two equally unpleasant alternatives.

False dilemmas- which are not paradoxical- included circular logic, irony, or a no-win situation – where real choices exist, but none lead to success. I began to think that trying to write this article was a no-win situation. Paradoxically?

Thus ‘Catch 22’ by Joseph Heller, which I thought was the epitome of a paradox, is actually a no-win situation. ‘There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.’

Well, F. Scott Fitzgerald said that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

Is this having your cake and eating it too? A claim that two apparently contradictory ideas are true is a paradox also. However, I am told that two statements which contradict each other are not a paradox but an antinomy.
Modern physics tells us that there are no separate observers, that we are part of and affect what we observe. Yet each of us has the sense of being an observer. And the statement that there are no observers is an observation!

The plot thickened even more when I discovered that there are many different kinds of paradoxes, too numerous even to mention here.

The Paradox of Time Travel
Sometimes supernatural or science fiction themes are held to be impossible due to resultant paradoxical conditions.

The theme of time travel has staged many popular paradoxes arising from the traveller interfering with the past. Suppose Rowan, who was born in 1950, travels back in time to 1901 and kills his own grandfather.

It follows that neither his father nor he himself will be born; but then he would not have existed to travel back in time and kill his own grandfather; but then his grandfather would not have died and Rowan himself would have lived.

This is known as the grandfather paradox or as simply the time paradox. Some suggest that if multiple universes exist, this problem disappears. Only, no doubt, to be replaced by other problems.

Liar Paradox
Paradoxes that arise from apparently intelligible uses of language are often of interest to logicians and philosophers. ‘This sentence is false’ is an example of the famous liar paradox: it is a sentence which cannot be consistently interpreted as true or false, because if it is false it must be true, and if it is true it must be false. Therefore, it can be concluded the sentence is both true and false.

According to one version of an ancient paradox, an Athenian is supposed to say “I am a liar.” It is then argued that if the statement is true, then he is telling the truth, and is therefore not a liar.

The need for paradox is no doubt rooted deep in the very nature of the use we make of language, and in our paradoxical universe itself.