Londoner wrote:
We could try to rephrase the paradox for another context, perhaps to be about spiritual boulders in God's world, but presumably as non-material boulders wouldn't ...(etc.)
The boulder problem is not a paradox. A paradox is a statement that can be assigned a truth value, false or true. When you assign a truth value of "true" to a paradoxical statement, then the statement yields a "false". When you assign a "false" to a paradoxical statement, it yields "true". These two mechanisms must act at the same time and in the same respect to a statement if the statement is to be a true paradox.
The boudler example is not a paradox. It is an example to show that true ompnipotence does not exist. It can't exist, it is logically impossible.
The boulder example says nothing about god, in a way as it is necessarily an aspect of god. Not being omnipotent is new for people to think god is that way, but it's nothing new, it's just that people get baffled when they are confronted with this truth. God would be unique to be all-powerful, but because omnipotence is impossible, and therefore not even god can have it, there is nothing special about non-omnipotence. We all possess that, incl. god.
The Boulder example only uses god as a vehicle to show that omnipotence is impossible. It uses the following mechanism of proof:
1. "A" is given.
2. "B" is a necessary and unavoidable subsequence of "A".
3. "B" necessarily renders "A" to be non-existent or false, or untrue, or impossible.
4. Therefore "A" will render "A" impossible. "A" necessarily renders itself impossible.
5. Therefore if "A" is not true, and we start with that, no change occurs, and "A" is not true (or impossible).
6. If "A" is true, then it turns out to be that "A" is not true.
7. Whether we start with "A" being true or else not true, either way we wind up with "A" being not true.
8. Therefore "A" is necessarily not true, in any way, in any word.
This is the mechanism of the Boulder example.
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In a paradox,
If "A", then necessarily and unavoidable it follows that "not A".
If "not A", then necessarily and unavoidably it follows that "A".
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In a paradox, you get a flicker effect . In the boulder effect, after you arrive at "not A", no more change can happen.
Therefore the Boulder example is not a paradox.
-- Updated September 17th, 2013, 10:23 pm to add the following --
MindforgedManacle: whew. Finally someone I can agree with. Once an argument requires a proper and bone fide, well-defined word for its meaning, to be redefined, and to allow special cases, which the language definition of the word does not allow, then we get into quagmires.
There was even a direction in philosophy, or a school, which was called "natural language" philosophers, or "normal-" or "common-langue philosophers". I can't even remember their name. This is again a problem, because language changes, and who is to say that the new meaning someone purports the word in the language to have, is not valid.
Language is a convention; we assume that we all understand each word the same way as other people understand them. This is what Natural Language Philosophers based their school on. But the premiss is not valid. There are variations of meaning between SOME words from person to person (not ALL words), and there is the change of the language.
As much as the Natural Language Philosophers were trying to say what their tenet was, they couldn't even say that much with all validity.
This is so sad.
