Expository Essay On George Moore's Paradox

George Moore was a British philosopher who primarily studied ethics, epistemology and metaphysics. He devised a remarkable paradox: Let’s suppose it is raining outside but you do not believe that it is raining, and you strongly commit to saying and believing that it is not raining. This could come across to some as an absurd or nonsensical thing to stress, but it could still be true. It could be raining outside, but you are entirely unaware of the current state of the weather. It can’t be entirely absurd of you to stress something about yourself that actually might be true of you, can it? This is the premise of Moore’s paradox.
To understand Moore’s paradox, we must assess both logical and performative contradictions. A logical contradiction is the “conjunction of a statement p and its denial not-p. According to the law of non-contradiction (more or less the same as the principle of bivalence), a statement and its denial cannot both be true. Some examples could be to assert that it is raining and it is not raining, or that you know that nothing can be known, or to say that all general claims have exceptions.” (Bernecker) A performative contradiction is unlike a logical contradiction, for a performative contradiction occurs “when the content of a statement contradicts either …show more content…
Omissive form implies that: p & I do not believe that p. Basically Moore is claiming, “In making a first-person, present-tense indicative assertion, one implies that one believes it.” (Bernecker) This is conducive with his first principle, wherein if one asserts the p, then one implies that one believes that p. When I assert that it is raining but I don’t believe that it is raining (p & I don’t believe that p), I assert that is raining (p), which would contradict the second conjunct of what I am asserting (that I don’t believe it is raining); hence what I am asserting contradicts what I imply by asserting