Which Alice?
Which Alice?
Which Alice?
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Looking-Glass Logic<br />
Lewis Carroll has told us very little about the other White<br />
Knight; all he told us was that he once tried to put on the first White<br />
Knight's helmet, which was very careless, considering that the first<br />
White Knight was in it at the time.<br />
Well, when <strong>Alice</strong> met him, she was totally baffled! So many<br />
statements he made seemed to be wrong! Could he be one of those<br />
people who always lie? thought <strong>Alice</strong>. No, she rejected this outright,<br />
since her intuition told her that he was a completely sincere person.<br />
But the things he said! First of all he told <strong>Alice</strong> that she was a<br />
unicorn. When <strong>Alice</strong> asked him, "Do you really believe I am a<br />
unicorn?" he answered, "No." Next he claimed that the White King<br />
was asleep and dreaming of <strong>Alice</strong>, but then he said the White King<br />
was not dreaming of anything. Then two contradictory statements<br />
came up (I forget just what they were) and he first claimed that one<br />
of them was true, then he claimed the other was false, and then he<br />
claimed that they were both true.<br />
At first, <strong>Alice</strong> thought that he was simply being inconsistent, but<br />
she could never catch him in a direct inconsistency—that is, she<br />
could find no statement which he claimed to be true and also<br />
claimed to be false, though he would claim that the statement was<br />
both true and false! Still, she could not get him to make separate<br />
claims—one that the statement was true, and the other that the<br />
statement was false.<br />
After several hours of questioning, <strong>Alice</strong> gathered an enormous<br />
114