The Raven Paradox

Hey everyone, welcome back to my blog!! Last week I mentioned that school wasn't too bad and somehow manageable, yeah so about that, IT IS AWFUL. I HAVE NO IDEA HOW I AM GOING TO SURVIVE THIS YEAR WITHOUT TURNING INTO A HOLLOW, PERSONALITY-LESS, EMPTY PERSON. Long story short, I have been sleeping for like six hours a night which is so bad compared to how much sport and extra stuff I do. I look like a raccoon and I also had my first cry yesterday since year thirteen started so it's not going too well. Aside from my soul being sucked out of me as each minute passes by in school, I have a really interesting post for today, especially if you enjoy proofs/logic!

What is a Paradox?

In philosophy, alongside many other disciplines of a scientific nature, a paradox is defined as a set of premises which all make sense and then have a really random conclusion. The conclusion logically makes sense, but it's just really contradictory to the premises. In simple terms, it's a really strange statement that logically is proven to be true.

There are two types of reasoning within logic and they are inductive and deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is essentially what we do in the sciences. From an existing theory, we formulate a hypothesis and then collect data to support the hypothesis. We would then analyse the data and either accept or reject the hypothesis. Inductive reasoning is when you find patterns within observations and then find a conclusion through the patterns you see. The raven paradox uses inductive reasoning.

The Raven Paradox

The raven paradox was presented by the philosopher Carl G. Hempel in his essay 'Studies in the Logic of Confirmation', let's get into it!

Suppose you decide one day that you develop a passion for bird watching. You join a bird watching club and realise you want to look at ravens all day. You see a lot of ravens and they're all black. You travel all across the world and notice that every raven you see is black, no matter where you go. You then develop the hypothesis (as every bird watcher does) that 'all ravens are black'.

In terms of logic, the hypothesis 'all ravens are black' is in the form of a conditional. This means it is a statement in the form 'if A then B'. According to the laws of logic, a conditional is equal to a contrapositive. This is a statement in the form 'if not B then not A'. For example, saying 'if I live in London then I live in England' is the same as saying 'if I don't live in England, I do not live in London'. This rule of logic is indisputable.

If we go back to the raven paradox, since our hypothesis is of a conditional nature, we are able to say that 'all non-back things are not ravens' or rather 'if an object isn't black, then it is not a raven'. The reason why this is quite a funny concept is because we can essentially look at anything and it would be proof that all ravens are black. For example, saying something like 'my table is white' it provides more evidence for the hypothesis that 'all ravens are black' because my table is white in colour and it is not a raven. Random statements like 'the sky is blue' or 'my dress is pink' all provides proof for the hypothesis, even though it is super irrelevant. 

I hope you enjoyed this week's post!! I know it is much shorter than normal but I realised that even though the examples and the paradox is something rather silly, it still involves some concentration and a bit of thinking, especially if you don't do many sciencey logic based subjects! I hope you all have a really great day and week ahead, love you guys <33