The Problem of Paradox

Excerpt taken from an interview on the ABC wireless show, the Philosopher's Zone, with Huw Price, author of 'Time's Arrow & Archimedes' Point', and Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University:

'Alan Saunders: There's a question here that relates I suppose to philosophy of science. I have a great deal of sympathy with Einstein because he is facing a situation which seems to mean that the prevailing theories have unacceptably paradoxical consequences, and it seems to me that it is reasonable in a situation like that, to say Well the paradoxes can't be reality, that's what a paradox is, it is something that is not describing reality. And the point about paradoxes is that they draw our attention to some failure in our understanding of the world, or our understanding of our thought processes, or whatever. Therefore, even if we haven't got the answer yet, there has to be a better answer than this. I mean that's a reasonable position for Einstein to adopt, isn't it?

Huw Price: Yes, I agree. I think it's a completely reasonable position. One of the difficulties, however, is that the issue as to whether something is actually paradoxical in the sense of a true logical paradox which simply can't be true, or whether it's merely something counter-intuitive that we have to live with, is a very difficult one. And in effect, Einstein's opponents were saying, Look, we've just discovered something new about the world.

Alan Saunders: Well when do we know that we've got something counter-intuitive that we have to live with and when do we know that we have something like Schrodinger's cat, which just shows that reality can't be like that?

Huw Price: It's very difficult. The problem that we were talking about before, the problem of where you draw the division between, as it were, the small stuff and the big stuff, the microscopic and the macroscopic, that problem emerges in a slightly different form as the problem as to what constitutes a measurement, because the view that there was that split between the microscopic and the macroscopic, tended to go a long with the view that the macroscopic things were the things like measuring devices, and the microscopic stuff became sharp in particular ways when it encountered these measuring devices.

Now if that's your view, then it becomes an important issue to say what it takes to be a measuring device. And that problem has come to be called the Measurement Problem. It is one which is still hotly debated and so one of the things that a proponent of any particular interpretation of quantum mechanics has to do, is to say what their answer to the Measurement Problem is.'

I honestly hadn't thought that paradoxes could be conceived of as a failure. That we have to live with them, sure. That they're problematic, on some level? Absolutely. That they are insufficient, a non-performance that does not meet desired ends? Hmm. Is it paradox itself, or is it us with our human limitations of understanding that is really at issue?