Fourteenth law of worker entropy

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The hoary old chestnut that underpins Thomas Kuhn’s radical, brilliant theory and succinctly describes what pragmatic people find so excruciating about academic philosophy.

Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.

If you read latter-day philosophical whizz-kid William MacAskill’s book What We Owe The Future, a question you will certainly ask yourself, though it isn’t so much silly as rueful, is: “why did I just do that do myself and how will I get those hours of my life back?”

The serious point — advanced by Kuhn — is that the boundaries of an intellectual discipline, power structure, narrative, paradigm — call it what you will — frame and condition the questions you may ask as much as any answers it provides. If you find yourself getting silly answers, the problem may lie in your question.

Hence, paradoxes: if your discipline is (as analytical philosophy is) riven with paradoxes, this is not so much a sign that you have hit upon an eternal conundrum, but that you are barking up the wrong tree.

Hence, a new JC law of worker entropy. Let us call it the fourteenth:

The JC’s fourteenth law of worker entropy, also known as the “paradox paradox”, states that paradoxes are impossible in sensible discussions because they are, necessarily, the product of asking silly questions.

A paradox is a silly answer. It means you have asked a silly question.

For example, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, that it is impossible to prove all axioms in a closed logical system, tells us one useful thing about the world, namely that it is silly idea to try to prove all axioms in a closed logical system, thus showing that even clever people, like Bertrand Russell, can ask silly questions.

See also

• Paradox