Paradoxes have always been of fundamental value to philosophers in presenting the peculiarities of a concept. For example, the renowned ‘liar paradox’ which came from Epimenides of Crete asserts that ‘Cretans are always liars’. The paradox in its most basic form arises from considering a single notion “This sentence is false.” So in turn, if the sentence is true, then it is false, and if it is false, then it is true.
Another example is the Sorites paradox, which assumes that if one grain of sand isn’t a heap, and two grains of sand aren’t a heap, and while you keep adding 2 more it still isn’t a heap, then by that logic 10,000 grains of sand don’t make a heap either.
The study of such semantic paradoxes led some logicians to determine the fallacies of logic. In logic, the statement is either true or false, whereas it can not be both at the same time. There is no middle ground in philosophy which made logicians, notably, Alfred Tarski, distinguish between object language and metalanguage and conclude that no language can consistently contain a complete semantic theory of its own sentences.
