80. Michael Huemer | Paradoxes

Do paradoxes reveal deep truths about reality, or do they mostly expose the hidden ways our language and concepts misfire?My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestMichael Huemer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his work has focused on ethics, epistemology, paradoxes, politics, and a variety of other issues.2. Interview SummaryThe interview centers on Paradox Lost and uses it as a springboard to walk through several classic philosophical puzzles. The opening section focuses on the liar paradox, where Huemer argues that the apparent contradiction is a symptom of inconsistent “instructions” in ordinary language: in the liar case, the language seems to tell us to assign a proposition that would be true iff false, but there simply is no such proposition—so the sentence fails to express a proposition at all. He contrasts this with dialetheist approaches (e.g., Graham Priest), and defends a broadly classical picture on which genuine contradictions can’t be true once you understand how negation works.From there, the conversation turns to vagueness and Huemer’s more radical “semantic nihilism” proposal: while classical logic and bivalence still apply to propositions, a huge proportion of everyday declarative sentences don’t manage to express a determinate proposition in the first place, so they aren’t straightforwardly true-or-false. To explain why such language can still be useful, he sketches an alternative way of thinking about meaning and mental content: our intentional states can be satisfied to degrees (not merely satisfied vs. unsatisfied), illustrated with simple desire-cases (cookie vs. brownie) and then extended—more controversially—to belief-like states.A later stretch is devoted to decision/probability puzzles. On Newcomb’s problem, Huemer defends two-boxing by appealing to a dominance-style argument (if the opaque box has $0, both is better; if it has $1M, both is still better), while the interviewer pushes back about what you should do given the predictor story. They also discuss whether you should “defer” to a more informed version of yourself, and how Simpson’s paradox-style reversals complicate that intuition. The final portion moves into self-locating/probabilistic reasoning: in the “shooting room” case, Huemer’s diagnosis is that once you learn that a particular person (“Vic”) was called in, you gain evidence about how late in the process you’re conditioning on, which undercuts the simplistic 50% reasoning. The interview closes by zooming out to broader anthropic-style arguments (including a Bayes-y case for reincarnation given infinite time, under explicit assumptions) and the background metaphysical commitments those arguments quietly rely on.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:04 - Liar paradox03:47 - Propositions10:15 - Logic14:43 - Truth16:36 - Other contradictions18:02 - Non-existent objects20:46 - Vagueness25:59 - Semantic uses29:14 - External factors31:09 - Terence Horgan34:43 - Newcomb’s problem37:19 - Transparent box case39:12 - Well-wishing friend42:32 - Simpson’s paradox47:08 - Deference49:32 - Valuing evidence vs. reward56:33 - Rationality59:18 - Predictably rewarded1:01:41 - Preparation1:07:54 - Perfect predictor1:10:29 - Free will1:11:57 - Rationality1:17:11 - Shooting room1:22:39 - Variations1:27:24 - Simulation1:28:44 - Infinite expectations1:29:44 - Possible in some other sense1:35:32 - Immortality1:38:27 - Names1:46:10 - Old evidence1:49:17 - Meaning of names1:52:27 - Personal identity1:54:33 - Moral relevance1:56:38 - Moral realism and phenomenal conservatism2:00:08 - Stance-dependent norms2:02:48 - Ordinary English2:05:51 - Value of philosophy2:09:04 - Conclusion This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fric.substack.com/subscribe