Augustine’s Pragmatic Paradoxes

Abstract

Abstract I cannot start this chapter. This opening sentence is undermined by my very act of writing it. Yet my opening sentence describes a possible state of affairs. Pragmatic paradoxes are contingent sentences that behave like contradictions or tautologies. In Aristophanes’s The Clouds, the debt-ridden Strepsiades swears that after Sokrates teaches him enough sophistry to evade creditors, Strepsiades will pay him a huge fee. Strepsiades’ promise to pay for knowledge of how to break his promises resembles a contradiction, but it is not a logical falsehood like “Someone promised something and no one promised anything.” After all, Strepsiades could keep his promise if Sokrates is trusting enough to accept a self-undermining assurance. Pragmatic paradoxes were common in Greek comedies. Greek orators used them as rhetorical devices. But Greek philosophers did not take pragmatic paradoxes seriously.