Is this a paradox?
People make reference to numbers all the time in everyday speech, in articles, journals and so on (not references to a class as in "all odd numbers" but individually like "17", "a googol", "the smallest perfect number greater than 1000", etcetera). Someone made the comment to me the other day that not all numbers will be referenced by a human being, there just isnt enough time to cite an infinite number of numbers. Given that, it seemed to me that there must be a smallest natural number which will never be referenced by a human being. Having said that, havent I just referenced it?
Anyone know if this has a name (or if I'm just making a simple thing complicated - I've been mulling it over for days now and I'm all confused...)
|