Abstract

Can victims of the oracle paradox, which is known primarily through its unexpected hanging and surprise examination versions, extricate themselves from their difficulties of reasoning? No. For they do not, contrary to recent opinion, commit errors of fallacious elimination. As I shall argue, the difficulties of reasoning faced by these victims do not originate in the domain of concepts, propositions and their entailment relations; nor do they result from misapprehensions about limitations on what can be known. The difficulties of reasoning flow, instead, from conflicts that arise in the practical dimension of life. The oracle paradox is in this way more evocative of problems faced in the theory of computation than it is like the celebrated Russell’s paradox.