Matt asked:

Explain this statement, discounting the obvious paradox:

Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

and this one:

Everything is true, nothing is permitted.

Meaning, explain HOW if nothing is true, everything is permitted and how if everything is true, nothing
is permitted. — I imagine you may enjoy this one. I look forward to your response.

============

If everything is true, then it is true that I am writing this and it is true that I am not writing this, and the
same for any other statement and its negation. It also follows from the truth of 'Everything is true' that
'Everything is not true' is true. — Either we are not talking about truth, or the claim is absurd.

Trivially, you can infer the truth of any statement from the truth of all statements, including both the
truth of the statement, 'Nothing is permitted' and the truth of the statement 'Everything is permitted.'

The statement, 'Nothing is true' looks at first sight to be making an equally absurd claim to the
statement, 'Everything is true'. If nothing is true, then it is not true that I am writing this and it is not
true that I am notwriting this, and so on. In this case, however, we can understand the claim in a
philosophically more interesting way, as the denial that the concept of truth is a meaningful concept.
Nothing is true, because the very ideaof something's being 'true' is absurd.

Does it follow from the rejection of the concept of truth that everything is permitted? The most radical
way to understand the rejection of the concept of truth is as the view that it is impossible to make an
objectivejudgement about anything. All each of us can say, on any question, is 'how things seem to
me'. You can't be wrong about how things subjectively seem to you at a given moment in time, and I
can't be wrong about how things subjectively seem to me. I do not assert that I amwriting this, but
only that it seems to me at this moment that I am writing this.

To say that something is not permitted, is to say that the doing of that thing is wrong.However, even
if I cannot assert that a particular action iswrong — because that would be making an objective truth
claim, and objective truth claims are not allowed — I can still assert that the action subjectively seems
wrong to me now. So even on the most radical interpretation of the statement 'Nothing is true,' if an
action subjectively seems wrong to me now, then on pain of self-contradiction, I ought not to permit
myself to do it.

Geoffrey Klempner