Quotes from work
Moore's paradox

Moore's paradox concerns the apparent absurdity involved in asserting a first-person present-tense sentence such as, "It's raining, but I don't believe that it is raining" or "It's raining but I believe that it is not raining." The first author to note this apparent absurdity was G. E. Moore. These 'Moorean' sentences, as they have become known, are paradoxical in that while they appear absurd, they nevertheless:


G. E. Moore photo

“It is raining but I do not believe that it is.”

G. E. Moore Moore's paradox

One of the statements presenting what has become known as "Moore's paradox, from a famous lecture concerning logical inconsistency in 1942, as quoted in Reason in Theory and Practice (1969) by Roy Edgley, p. 71; in which he also stated "It is not raining, but I believe that it is." These sentences are not logically contradictory, and yet it seems that no one could make a true assertion by sincerely speaking them. It is reported that Ludwig Wittgenstein, on hearing of Moore's lecture, went to Moore's house in the middle of the night to ask him to repeat it, and considered the problems presented by it Moore's greatest contributions to philosophy.
Variants:
It is raining but I don't believe that it is.
As quoted in Directives and Norms (1968) by Alf Ross, Brian Loar, p. 27.
It is raining but I don't believe that it is raining.
As quoted in Foundations of Illocutionary Logic(1985) by John R. Searle and Daniel Vanderveken, p. 19.

Similar authors

G. E. Moore photo
G. E. Moore3
British philosopher 1873–1958
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein228
Austrian-British philosopher None
Martin Heidegger photo
Martin Heidegger69
German philosopher None
Paulo Freire photo
Paulo Freire115
educator and philosopher None
Emil M. Cioran photo
Emil M. Cioran531
Romanian philosopher and essayist None
Bertrand Russell photo
Bertrand Russell562
logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and politi… None
Ayn Rand photo
Ayn Rand322
Russian-American novelist and philosopher None
Paul Valéry photo
Paul Valéry89
French poet, essayist, and philosopher None
Henri Bergson photo
Henri Bergson18
French philosopher None
Friedrich Hayek photo
Friedrich Hayek79
Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economic… None