Abstract

Theories often run into paradoxes. Some of these are outright contradictions, sending the would-be champions of the theory back to the drawing board. Others are paradoxical in the sense of being bizarre and unexpected. The latter are sometimes mistakenly thought to be instances of the former. That is, they are thought to be more than merely weird; they are mistakenly thought to be self-refuting. Showing that they are not self-contradictory but merely a surprise is often a challenge. Notions of explanation and understanding are often at issue. For instance, we might explain—or explain away—a paradox by invoking some mechanism provided by the theory and showing how it does not really lead to a logically incoherent ..