Slate's Bizbox
chatterbox: Gossip, speculation, and scuttlebutt about politics.

Gödel, Escher, Brock, Part 2

Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, June 28, 2001, at 5:49 PM ET

Chatterbox continues to wrestle with the question of whether David Brock's lurid confessions might be true. As he explained yesterday, it all boils down to Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which translates paradoxical statements like "Everything I say is a lie" into the language of mathematics. With a little manipulation, though, the Brock Paradox can be rendered soluble. Or can it?

We take for our text a purported solution to the Liar's Paradox (as it was known to the Greeks) by David Tribble, a software engineer in Plano, Texas. Tribble works off the following version of the Liar's Paradox:

Epimenides is a Cretan.
Epimenides states, "All Cretans are liars."

Chatterbox thinks a fair summary of David Brock's article, "I Killed Anita Hill (I'm Sorry)," in the August issue of Talk and, very likely, the forthcoming book (Blinded by the Right) from which it is excerpted, would be as follows:

Brock is a conservative.
Brock states, "All conservatives are liars."

Using this template, we can now put the Talk piece through Tribble's solution, which assumes that there is more than one Cretan, and that Epimenides is a liar. In Tribble's proof, Chatterbox has substituted "Brock" for "Epimenides" and "conservatives" for "Cretans." Thus:

P. 1 Brock is a conservative.
P. 2 Brock is either a liar or a truth-teller.
P. 3 His statement is either true or false.

And now we start dropping in Tribble's assumptions:

P. 4 There is more than one conservative.
P. 5 Brock is a liar.
P. 6 Thus Brock's statement is false.
P. 7 Thus "All conservatives are liars" is false.
P. 8 Thus not all conservatives are liars.
P. 9 Thus some (one or more but not all) conservatives are not liars.
P. 10 Thus at least one (but not all) of them is a liar.
P. 11 Thus Brock, a conservative, could be a liar.

Problem: Although Brock was still describing himself as a conservative when he began his confessional jag three years ago, the subtitle of his forthcoming book, inconveniently, is The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (a play on the title of a famous book by Barry Goldwater). Thus we need to reformulate the paradox as follows:

David Brock was a conservative.
Brock states, "All conservatives are liars."

Unfortunately, this isn't much of a paradox. David Brock was a conservative, hence was a liar; now he may or may not be a liar, hence his contention that all conservatives are liars could be true. In this formulation, Brock seems more like Whittaker Chambers than like Epimenides.

But wait! Let's take another look at that Talk headline: "I Killed Anita Hill (Sorry, Anita)." Anita Hill is not dead. Therefore Brock couldn't have killed her. This shows Brock is still a liar, even though he says he is no longer a conservative. Which means Brock must be lying when he says he's no longer a conservative! Which means Tribble's proof is still plausible. ...

Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
E-mail Timothy Noah at .
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Reader Comments From The Fray:



Some time ago there was much speculation about whether the loathsome felon Chuck Colson should be forgiven his sins given that he has found Jesus and repented etc. etc. Colson opportunistically found Jesus after he was caught, tried, and imprisoned. David Brock, on the other hand, repented for no reason except... a conscience.

Tim: You do no good person any favors by making fun of Brock. He rejected evil because he recognized it to be evil. He's an honest convert, disgusted by his sins.

--David Edelstein

(To reply, click here.)


 Although I am Jesuit educated, there is no better way to bring out the thug in me (which admittedly is never very far below the surface) than actually trying to use the intellectual fripperies of the Liar's Paradox and its greconymic cousins. I have no doubt that the mathematics have utility for some genius inventing a more efficient method of routing telephone calls. However, for the rest of us, it is really far too cute to be trotting out equations to determine whether we should believe Brock. The real question underneath the calculus is whether you can believe a demonstrated liar. To put a finer point on it, the question is whether you can believe a demonstrated liar who is trying to rehabilitate himself by admitting he lied. In this case, the answer is straightforward and obvious. If you are a liberal, Brock is now telling the truth. If you are a conservative, he is now lying.

I am a conservative.
All conservatives are liars.

--Cato the Censor

(To reply, click here.)

 (7/3)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Unsung Statesman
Marc Thiessen | By the time he left office, Jesse Helms had become a mainstream conservative.
David Broder: Unabashed Racist