Re: The set of all JOKES.....

On 24 Feb., 13:46, "LauLuna" <laureanol...@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

You propose the following as the definition of one set and one joke:

'this is the set of all jokes that does include itself'

Let's call it 'J' and let me reformulate:

J =def. (x; x is a joke or x=J)

The definiens includes the definiendum. So, it is not a definition.

Quite wrong!

Bertrand Russell gave us "The set of all sets that does not include
itself". That is where your last statement came from. The joke is a
pastiche of the Russell "Set of all sets".

Your point seems to be that you can fix the circularity by means of
'itself'.

It is an illusion. 'Itself' is a pronoun and is in the place of a
noun, and the noun is in this context precisely 'J'.

That is the joke. The word "itself" does not of itself NEED to be used
in place of a noun. It is not rigidly, and for all time, condemned to
be a pronoun. As a WORD, and nothing but a word, it is a NOUN.

I think some kinds of radical egalitarianism arise from this mistake.

No mistake. You just failed to be flexible enough to see the PUN from
both directions.

History advises not to take this as a joke.

History advises that those who speak for history are invariably wrong.

A friend in England said that the "set of all jokes" is something that
one tells today, and in twenty years' time, somebody goes "Har, har,
har". A sense of humour is necessary if one wishes to understand
jokes.

Charles Douglas Wehner



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