this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
124 points (88.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43989 readers
1328 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wait, what is a catch-22 but a paradox? Iโve never thought about this before, but Yossarian is stuck in a paradoxical situation so these are synonymous terms right?
I don't think so. I interpret paradoxes as being either philosophical impasses (ie, 2 conceptually true statements conflict each other in a way that makes you question where one statement's truth ends and the other statement's truth begins) or a situation in which a solution is unintuitive.
A Catch-22 is more of a physical and intentional impasse, where obstacles are intentionally set up in such a way that people are unable to make a choice. For instance, in the original example of a Catch-22, there is no philosophical argument saying that only insane people are allowed to not fly - it is an arbitrary rule that some higher-up established. And likewise, it is entirely arbitrary to define insane as being willing to fly.
I guess to simplify my stance, it's a paradox if it makes you think "the universe has made this unsolvable" and it's a Catch-22 if it makes you think "some asshole made this unsolvable"
This makes quite a lot of sense, thanks for explaining that to me!