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Originally Posted by Harvey1
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The sacred truth of science is that there are no sacred truths
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If that were true, then let S be any scientific sentence. If every S is possibly false, then so is the sentence: "there is good reason to believe a scientific sentence is more approximately correct of nature versus a non-scientific sentence." Any sentence that is used to justify this sentence itself would be possibly false ad infinitum. Even this sentence is possibly false! |
Yes, everytime we employ self-reference we arrive in difficulty (see Russell's Paradox, Burali-Forti's Paradox, and a bunch involving lying Cretans. Douglas R. Hofstadter covered them nicely in
Godel, Escher Back: An Eternal Golden Braid.)
The fact that one can invent paradoxes at will by the simple trick of self-reference, however, doesn't really do justice to the elegance of Sagan's statement, which instead uses self-reference to make a deeply important point about science. I like the way he does it better, thanks.