Meta Logic
Here is a logic puzzle.
Puzzle. You are visiting an island where all people know each other. The islanders are of two types: truth-tellers who always tell the truth and liars who always lie. You meet three islanders—Alice, Bob, and Charlie—and ask each of them, “Of the two other islanders here, how many are truth-tellers?” Alice replies, “Zero.” Bob replies, “One.” What will Charlie’s reply be?
The solution proceeds as follows. Suppose Alice is a truth-teller. Then Bob and Charlie are liars. In this situation Bob’s statement is true, which is a contradiction. Hence, Alice is a liar. It follows, that there is at least one truth-teller between Bob and Charlie. Suppose Bob is a liar. Then the statement that there is one truth-teller between Alice and Charlie is wrong. It follows that Charlie is a liar. We have a contradiction again. Thus, Alice is a liar and Bob is a truth-teller. From Bob’s statement, we know that Charlie must be a truth-teller. That means, Charlie says “One.”
But here is another solution suggested by my students that uses meta considerations. A truth-teller has only one possibility for the answer, while a liar can choose between any numbers that are not true. Even if we assume that the answer is only one of three numbers—0, 1, or 2—then the liar still has two options for the answer. If Charlie is a liar, there can’t be a unique answer to this puzzle. Thus, the puzzle question implies that Charlie is a truth-teller. It follows that Alice must be lying and Bob must be telling the truth. And the answer is the same: Charlie says, “One.”
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The meta-logic solution is elegant, but precludes the possibility that the solution to the puzzle is paradoxical and logically unstable. It turns out that this is not the case, but I wonder if we can set initial conditions that do result in paradox 🙂
8 March 2020, 1:11 am