Paradox

The most basic type of paradox is a dramatic rhetorical device that offers an unorthodox insight because of using a single word with different or contradictory meanings. On a very simple level, if John is walking through the door of a room, it can be said that “John is in the room,” or that “John is not in the room,” or that “John is partly in the room and partly not in the room.” That John can be considered to be in the room or not in the room is a paradox, because these statements can be seen as true but are contradictory.

Some scholars view paradox as a superficial and trivial rhetorical device, comparable to a pun. However, others view paradox as being on almost the same level as the four master tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Sometimes a paradox results from a major paradigm shift in the history of ideas, as when particular words take on expanded meanings. A simplified example is the word man. Its most basic meaning or earliest meaning may have been man in contrast to animal, that is, human compared to beast. But then it took on the meaning of man in contrast to woman, followed by the word acquiring the additional connotations of bravery, noble behavior, or whatever “strong” qualities the speaker admires.

Paradoxes can also be approached philosophically. Willard Van Orman Quine divided resolvable paradoxes into two kinds: veridical paradoxes, which lead to a true conclusion, and falsidical paradoxes, which lead to a false conclusion. Frederic’s “birthday paradox” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance is that he has had only five birthdays, yet he is 21 years old. The explanation is that he was born on “leap day,” February 29, and the paradoxical statement is based on whether a birthday is a particular number on a calendar or the celebration of one more year (365 and one-fourth days) of life. Because the conclusion is true, given the premises, Quine considers this a veridical paradox.

In contrast, the “grandfather paradox” is said to show the absurdity of time travel; if you could travel back in time, then you could kill your grandfather before your father was conceived. But this isn't possible, because if you did so, you would not exist. Therefore, you can't travel back in time; because the conclusion is false, this is a falsidical paradox.

A third class of paradoxes is antinomy, which cannot be resolved through rational evidence. For example, with the old explanation that the world is sitting on the back of a giant turtle, the obvious question is, “But what is that turtle sitting on?” The reason people smile when they answer, “It’s turtles all the way down,” is that they recognize the paradox as an antinomy.

There is another, nonphilosophical, sense of paradox, which is based on the wording, the verbiage, as when a statement treats two different senses of a word as though they have the same meaning. In his essay, “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “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.” One of the reasons that young children have so much fun with riddles, especially knock-knock jokes, is that [Page 552]these jokes encourage children to take their first steps toward developing the ability to hold opposing ideas. Some of the jokes they find so funny are “accidental” puns, meaning they are based on words that sound the same but have totally different meanings simply as an accident in the language, because English speakers have adopted and adapted words from so many different languages, as with the titles of Fred Gwynne’s children’s picture books, including The King Who Rained, A Chocolate Moose for Dinner, and A Little Pigeon Toad. But children also love the puns in Peggy Parish’s Amelia Bedelia books, in which the jokes are mostly based on the dual meanings of words that are semantically related to each other. Amelia Bedelia is a house maid who constantly misunderstands the directions from her employers. When they tell her to “stamp the envelopes,” she puts them on the ground and stamps on them with her feet, and when they tell her to “draw the drapes” she gets out pencil and paper and draws a picture of the drapes. Whereas adults take the double meanings in so-called dead metaphors for granted, children may give them more thought. For example, consider this

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