The fun with PO politicians and advisers is greater when they themselves don’t know whether they believe they are lying, telling the truth, or lying and thinking they are telling the truth.
Once dr. Bogusław Grabowski appears in Bogdan Rymanowski’s program (on Radio Zet), panic ensues on Civic Platform. Wrongly, because, as Marek Belka and Ryszard Petru discovered independently, “everyone knows everything”. And then there’s the liar paradox. The final cause for panic in the PO is Dr. Grabowski that politicians have to lie to win elections. It is reassuring to know that “a few decades ago it was possible to tell the truth.”
Panic in PO stems from a lack of philosophical or logical sophistication. A certain Epimenides, who lived at the beginning of the seventh and sixth centuries BC, said that “all Cretans are liars” (Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται). Except that he himself was Cretan. Could Cretan’s sentence be true if he is one of the liars? Or maybe not all Cretans lie, and only one of them – Epimenides – lied about them?
The problem that arose in connection with Epimenides was taken up by the philosopher from Miletus – Eubulides (he lived in the 4th century BC). If someone says, “I’m lying now,” he is either a liar or telling the truth. If he is lying, then by saying “I am lying now” he is telling the truth, and therefore he is not a liar. If he is telling the truth, it means he is lying because the sentence he uttered is a lie.
As far back as the 20th century, the Polish philosopher and logician Alfred Tarski explained that the liar paradox arises when a sentence refers to itself (“what I say now”) and contains a negation (“is a lie”). If a liar lies, he is telling the truth because he claims to be lying. But if he speaks the truth, he cannot lie (intentionally speaking untruth). Tarski assumed that when a sentence refers to itself, it does not refer to reality, does not convey any content about it, but only talks about its own form. So we have two levels: object language and meta language. In the first sentence they say something about the world, in the second sentence they talk about other sentences.
If the explanation of the liar paradox does not clear up anything in the minds of PO politicians, then it is difficult, even if the rope has been thrown at them. At most, they will have even more confusion in their heads to find out whether Bogusław Grabowski is a liar or whether he is telling the truth. Or does it use object language or meta language? Thanks to the liar paradox, the fun with PO politicians and advisers is greater because they themselves don’t know whether they are telling the truth when they think they are lying or whether they are lying when they think they are telling the truth. It would be easier to assume, and this is probably what Bogusław Grabowski thinks, that they always lie, but then it wouldn’t be fun.
If PO politicians and advisers knew and understood the liar paradox, there would be no panic after January 10, 2023. included, for example 500 Plus for the richest. Immediately! (…) 13th, 14th pension – these are not pensions. This should be included in the normal benefits. The conclusion was as follows: “The opposition must tell the truth: without longer work from Poland, we will not be able to support unemployed pensioners in the future.” This, of course, is where the aforementioned liar paradox comes into play.
In addition to the liar’s paradox, there is also the idiot’s paradox, i.e. the problem of whether, in spite of Bogusław Grabowski’s words, the idiots are Poles (the speaker’s conviction) or whether Grabowski himself is the idiot (the Poles ‘ believe). The belief that Poles are idiots who “have no idea what they are talking about” was brought to Grabowski by the result of a poll in which 64 percent of compatriots turned out against the introduction of the euro in Poland. Poles were led to believe that Grabowski is an asshole through the experience of governments the economist helped and his current advice to Donald Tusk and company.
Meanwhile, the matter is – as the philosopher Bronisław Komorowski would say – “extremely simple”: the paradox of the liar and the paradox of the idiot should simply be avoided. Not saying anything that would later be considered a lie. In political practice, this means no program or refusal to disclose it. In July 2019, the late Prof. Marcin Król postulated: “It is time to end the programs and all this banal and empty language of politics. (…) Let’s stop talking about programs, agree on their details and discuss them, as if programs were a form of knowledge and a promise of practical action. (…) The program is a very bad form of storytelling”.
The essence of things is to gain power. 18 January 2020 prof.dr.ir. Marcin Król wrote in “Gazeta Wyborcza”: “Politics is the art of gaining and keeping power. Just enough. The only measure of a policy is its effectiveness. (…) Who forgets, loses. Who fights for real democracy , also loses.(…) Politics, considered at this highest level, is not subject to any evaluation: from the point of view of morality, from the point of view of values, goals or practices.” As you can see, the paradoxes of the liar cause and the bastard no problems if these paradoxes are not present.
As suggested to Donald Tusk and company by Prof. King, “the goal may be to acquire mere power and the pleasures thereof (tyrant, despot). The goal can be money for themselves or for the whole group, and therefore lies, theft, nepotism, oligarchy of the country. The goal may be the pleasure found in manipulating people.” The question is, of course, whether the liar’s paradox also applies to Prof. Marcin Krol. In any case, it is not about Donald Tusk, and why has already been explained by Bogusław Grabowski.
Source: wPolityce