I was sitting in my wife’s intro to philosophy class a while ago, and the professor was reviewing their first exam. He chided the students for relying on cutesy arguments against certain positions such as the following: “Relativism must be wrong, because if nothing is true or false, what of relativism?”
The professor warned the students that such self-referential arguments were very dangerous, and that a sharp opponent would make “mincemeat” of them if they weren’t careful.
Now to the extent that many arguments in the Austro-libertarian tradition rely on such “tricks”—e.g. the proof that action exists, or the critique of positivism—I sat up and took notice. And I must confess, the professor’s argument (below) seemed pretty compelling. Any thoughts?
A Demonstration That Self-Referential Arguments Are Dangerous Suppose I have a set of false propositions, such as:
- Keynes is better than Mises.
- The market is unfair.
- Human Action is short.
Now I add a fourth proposition:
- Propositions (1) through (4) are all false.
Now what can we conclude? Proposition (4) is either true or false. Suppose that it’s true. Wait—we can’t, because if proposition (4) is true, then proposition (4) must be false, a contradiction. Therefore proposition (4) must be false. So that means that at least one proposition from (1) through (4) must be true. We already know that it can’t be proposition (4), so we conclude that at least one proposition from (1) through (3) is true.
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Since there is clearly something fishy about this argument, the philosophy professor said that no respectable philosopher relies on self-referential/contradiction arguments like this anymore. First, is this true? Second, does it have implications for Austro-libertarian arguments in this context?
