In 1901, the English philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell discovered a problem, a

paradox at the heart of mathematics and all of science. The paradox specifically concerns a
foundational branch of mathematics called set theory. So, in this lecture, I teach you all of set
theory in like eight minutes and then I show how the paradox arises. Russell himself and many
other mathematicians thought that they could solve this paradox, but I argue that they can't,
and they don't. So, let's get started. What is a number? Take, for example, the number four. I'm
not talking about four potatoes or four tomatoes or four hairs; I'm talking about the number
four itself. We know lots of things about the number four, like that it is evenly divisible by two
and that it's the square root of sixteen, I think. I'm talking about the number itself, and I'm also
not talking about this right here. This is not the number four; this is the Arabic numeral written
on a piece of glass, the Arabic numeral that represents the number four. We have other
numerals that represent numbers, like this one. That's the Roman numeral four. We use it for
counting Super Bowls here in the United States. The number itself is something that no one has
ever seen or touched, but we seem to know things about it, and also it and every other
number is essential to science, technology, and all of human life. Immanuel Kant was a Prussian
philosopher living in the 1700s. This painting of him was actually done in color, but I've
changed it to black and white to make it seem even older. He thought that mathematics was a
construction of the human mind, and if that's right, then mathematical truths are in some
sense or rather subjective. But the German and English philosophers Gottlob Frege and
Bertrand Russell didn't like this. They thought that mathematics had to be objective.

To refute and counteract Kant's view, they developed a view called logicism. According to
logicism, mathematics is a branch of logic, and the most basic type of math, which is
arithmetic, could be reduced to just first-order basic logic and set theory. I'll explain what set
theory is in a second. They thought that if they could succeed in reducing arithmetic to logic
and set theory, then they would be able to answer this question: what is a number? And the
answer would be that numbers are sets. Okay, well, what is a set? A set is a collection of
objects. The branch of mathematics that studies sets or collections of objects was invented by
the Russian-German mathematician Georg Cantor in the 1870s. Cantor proved that some
infinities were larger than other infinities. Yes, that's right. The idea is that you could have an
infinite number of something and then an infinite number of something else, but that you'd
have more of one than the other. Yes, it's wild. In order to do this, he had to invent set theory.
And so now, I'm going to teach you set theory very quickly. But then set theory is going to run
into a terrible problem. It's going to seem terrible. They're going to try to solve it, but then I'm
going to show that they didn't really solve it. The version of set theory that I'm going to explain
to you in the next few minutes is naive set theory. It's called naive just because it's the ordinary
set theory that we can formulate in ordinary languages like English, and it's contrasted with
formal or axiomatic set theory, which is formulated in an artificial logical language. You don't
have to worry about any of that. A set is a collection of objects, like the set of these markers.
There are three markers here, and the set of these markers contains three items within it. But
the objects in a set don't need to be collected together in space or time in order to be a set for
the purposes of set theory. So, on the one hand, we could have the set of those three markers,
but we could also have the set of all of the people watching this video who are spread out all
over the world, maybe they're spread out throughout time. Moreover, the objects in a set
don't need to be related to each other in any significant or meaningful way. Another set could
be the set of LeBron James, the four-time NBA champion, and the top half of the Eiffel Tower.
These things have nothing to do with each other really, but we have a set with those two things
in them, those two members, those two items. Anything that we can refer to, anything that we
can imagine, that can be in a set. We could have a set that consists of LeBron James, the four-
time NBA champion, and Harry Potter, the young wizarding boy who does not exist. That set
contains those two objects, one of which has won an NBA championship four times, as of the
recording of this video, and the other one is a non-existent boy with magic powers. Indeed,
sets can even include objects that can't be imagined. We could have the set of all objects that
cannot be imagined. That's a set too, and it contains many, many things, perhaps an infinite
number of things, things that can't be imagined. You see these squiggly brackets? The squiggly
brackets are used in set theory to pick out the set, and all the stuff inside those brackets are
the stuff in the set. So, this is the set of LeBron James and the number four. There are two
things in this set, a number and a basketball player. On this form of notation, in order to pick
out a set in writing, we would have to write out all of the things that are in that set. But that's
too clumsy if it's a big set, like the set of all cats. The set of all cats includes many, many things,
too many cats to list out, and also, we don't even know all the names of all the cats, all the cats
in the world, all the cats in the universe. So, instead, we use this notation, which is read as
follows: the set of all x's such that x is a cat. That's called the set builder or intentional notation.
You don't have to remember that. The other crucial thing is the word contains. We say that a
set contains all of the objects that are members of that set. So, this set from before contains
LeBron James and the number four. The set of all cats contains Garfield and all the other cats as
well. A set is a many that allows itself to be thought of as a one. Georg Cantor never said that;
someone just said that he said that, but he didn't really say it. A set is a gathering together into
a whole of definite, distinct objects of our perception or of our thought, which are called
elements of the set. He did really say that, but he said it in German. When Cantor invented set
theory in the 1870s, he wasn't just making up a mathematical game for the sake of it. No, no.
We deal with sets every day. Suppose that someone says, "That pile of potatoes is enormous."
They're not talking about the individual potatoes. They're not saying the individual potatoes
are enormous. Some of them may be quite large, but some of them are small, like finger

ling potatoes. I'm gonna try to find a photo of a fingerling potato or some other kinds of
potatoes. Anyway, when we say that that pile of potatoes is enormous, we're talking about the
pile, not the individual potatoes. And we do the same thing with objects that are not collected
together spatially. "The world population of cats is enormous." The cats aren't collected
together in space, but we're talking about all of the cats as a whole, and we're saying that that
population is enormous. We're not saying that the individual cats are enormous, although
some of them might be quite hefty. The paradox, the logical problem that Russell discovers in
1901, concerns one or more of the rules of set theory. So, let's go through some rules real
quick before we can get to the paradox. Rule number one: unrestricted composition. That just
means we can make any sets we want. Any set that you can think of, that's a set. In the formal,
axiomatized version of set theory, this is called the axiom of unrestricted comprehension. You
don't have to remember that. Rule number two: set identity is determined by membership.
What does this mean? It means that what makes a certain set the set that it is, is just what's
inside of it. It doesn't matter how we label that stuff; it doesn't matter how we label the whole
set as a whole. All that matters is what's in the set. In formal, axiomatized set theory, this is
called the axiom of extensionality. You do not have to remember that. Rule number three: the
order of elements in a set doesn't matter. Here, for example, are two sets: the set of the
number one and the number two, and the set of the number two and the number one. These
two sets are the same set because the order that you put the items in, the objects, it doesn't
matter. Now, you can see this rule, this really comes from number two. Number two says that
set identity is determined by membership. All that matters is who's a member or what items
are a member of the set. It doesn't matter the order. Rule number four: repeats don't change
anything. This set right here, which contains the number one, the number two, and the
number two, is exactly the same set that we were talking about five seconds ago. It's the set of
just the numbers one and two. If you repeat a number or a member of a set, it doesn't change
the set because set identity is determined by membership. That's rule number four, which is
really just derived from rule number two. Rule number five: the description of the items in a
set doesn't matter. For example, the set that contains just LeBron James and the set that
contains all x's, all things such that that thing is the NBA all-time scoring leader, playoffs
included. I'm including the playoffs. If you only talk about the regular season, then Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar, as of this recording, is still the all-time points leader. But if you include regular
season and playoffs, then it's already LeBron James. Those two sets are the same set. It doesn't
matter if you describe him as LeBron James or King James or the NBA all-time scoring leader.
Either way, it's the same set containing the same one item in it, and that's that guy who's a
basketball player. Rule number six: the union of any two or more sets is itself a set. This rule
just means that if you take two sets, like the set of all cats and the set of all dogs, and you
combine them, and then you've got the set of all cats and dogs, well, that's a set too. This rule,
number six, comes from rule number one because rule number one says you could just make
any sets you want. So, if you got two sets and then you put them together, that's another set.
You can make that one too. Rule seven: any subset is a set. A subset is just a set containing
some of the items that are contained in another set. And that comes from rule one too. If you
can make any set, then any set you've got, well, any group of those items in there, that's a
subset. That's a set too. Rule eight: a set can have just one member. This set contains one item
or one element, and that is LeBron James, four-time NBA champion. A set with just one
member is called a singleton set. One important thing to notice is that this set, this singleton
set, is not the same as LeBron James. LeBron James is a four-time NBA champion. This set, the
singleton set containing LeBron James, is a zero-time NBA champion. It has never won an NBA
championship, and it has never played a game of basketball because it is a set. This rule, rule
number eight, also derives from rule number one. If we can make any set that we want, well
then we can make a set with just one item in it. Okay, we are approaching the point where one
of these rules is going to generate the paradox. It's going to blow the whole thing up. Hold on,
it's coming. Rule number nine: a set can have no members. This set is called the empty set. You
can write it like this, with just the squiggles and nothing in between, or you can signify it with
this, which is a like a zero with a line through it, which means nothing. This is an empty set, the
empty set, or it's called the null set. The fact that there can be such a set just derives from rule
number one, unrestricted composition. You can make any sets you want, including a set with
nothing in it. But it is derived from number two, that set identity is determined by
membership, that there's only one empty set or only one null set. That one set with nothing in
it, it's defined by the fact that it has nothing in it. So, if you have two sets and they're both
empty, they're the same set, the null set. Now, things get juicy. Rule number 10: you can have
sets of sets. This just follows from number one as well. If you can make a set out of anything
that you can think of, well, you can think of sets too, can't you? Sets can have sets in them. For
example, the set of all singleton sets. You'd write it like this, which reads the set of all x's such
that x is a singleton set. That is a set of all sets. It contains the set that just includes LeBron
James. It contains the set that just includes the number 17. It does not contain LeBron James
because this is the set of all singleton sets, and LeBron James is not a singleton set. He's not a
set at all. He's a four-time NBA champion. Or you could have the set of all sets, the set of all x's
such that x is a set. This, by the way, is how Frege and Russell answered that question from
before: what are numbers? They thought, at least they thought until Russell's paradox just
blew the whole thing up, they thought that the number one just is the set of all singleton sets,
the set of all sets with one member, and the number two just is the set of all sets with

two members. Now, you might be thinking, "I can't wrap my head around this. What does it
really mean for the number four to just be a certain set? What does that really mean?" Don't
worry, no one really understands what that means, not really. Anyway, it doesn't matter
because the whole thing is going to be blown up right now with the next rule, which is rule
number 11. Sets can contain themselves. This one's weird, and it's going to give us the paradox.
But that just comes from rule number one also. If you can, if you can think of it, you can throw
it in a set, and so you can think of sets, and so you can throw sets in themselves. Consider, for
example, the set of all cats. Does that set contain itself? No, because that set is not itself a cat;
it's a set, and everything in it is a cat, so it does not contain itself. What about the set of all sets,
the set of all x's such that x is a set? Does that set contain itself? Yes, that set contains all the
sets, and it is itself one of those sets, so it contains itself. Or the set of all the things that I'm
thinking about. This set doesn't usually contain itself, but right now it does because right now,
I'm thinking of that set. Let's follow the pattern of thought that Russell was following in 1901
and 1902 when he discovered this paradox. He was just thinking about and developing this
idea, rule number 11, that sets can contain themselves. Think about all the sets that do not
contain themselves. The singleton set with just LeBron James, does it contain itself? No,
because it just has one thing in there, and that's LeBron, not any sets, let alone itself. The set of
all cats doesn't contain itself because it itself is a set, not a cat. The set of all singleton sets,
does that set contain itself? No, because there are a lot of singleton sets, and so the set of all
singleton sets has a lot of sets in it, and so it is itself not a singleton set. It's got many, many
members, many, many items in it, and so it doesn't contain itself. And then here are some sets
that do contain themselves: the set of all sets that contains itself, the set of all non-singleton
sets. Yeah, that set contains itself because there are many non-singleton sets, and so that set,
the set of all non-singleton sets, has many members, and so it's a non-singleton set. So,
because that set meets its own condition, it is inside of itself. Or the set of all sets that have
been mentioned in this room, this room which is an endless black abyss from which I am
speaking to you right now. Up until right now, that set did not include itself, but I just
mentioned it, so now it does. Here's the next thought that Russell had in England in 1901.
Okay, let's take all those sets that do contain themselves. Let's collect all of them together and
make another set out of them, the set of sets that contain themselves. Now, we've got a set of
those. We'd write it like this, the set of all x's such that x is a set that contains itself. Now, let's
take all of the sets that do not contain themselves, collect them together, make a set out of
those. Russell thinks to himself in 1901 as he's barreling toward a paradox that's going to blow
up the whole project to form the foundation of mathematics and all of science. This set that
includes all of those is the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, and we'd write that
like this, the set of all x's such that x is a set that does not contain itself. And then something
happened. He realized a problem, and he wrote this problem in a letter in 1902 on June 16th to
Frege, and Frege received the letter. This is what the letter really looked like. Frege got the
letter, and it broke him physically. He had a breakdown and had to be hospitalized upon reading
this two-page letter. And the letter asked this question: the set of all sets that do not contain
themselves, this set, does it contain itself? Here it is again, the set of all x's, the set of all things
such that x is a set that does not contain itself. Does this set contain itself? Well, let's go
through both possibilities. If it does, then this set is in here; it's in itself. And the only way to be
in there is to meet this condition, the condition of not containing oneself. So, if this set does
contain itself, well then it meets this condition, and this condition says that it doesn't contain
itself. If it does contain itself, then it doesn't. And consider the alternative possibility: if it
doesn't contain itself, then it meets the condition; it's a set that doesn't contain itself. So, if it
doesn't contain itself, it meets the condition, and then it's in there, which means it contains
itself. So, if this set doesn't contain itself, then it does contain itself. If it doesn't, then it does,
and if it does, then it doesn't. So, this set both contains itself and doesn't contain itself, and
that's just a contradiction. So, set theory doesn't work. That's the paradox. Now, you might be
thinking, "Oh, okay, well, that's no problem. Set theory was just some made-up rules, right?
That's how math is; we just make things up. Axioms are stipulated, which is to say, made-up
claims, so we just made up all these rules, including rule 10 and rule 11." And rule 11 is really
the source of the paradox. Once you let sets contain themselves, well then, you're going to be
able to formulate this set, and this set is the one that leads to the paradox. So, let's just change
the rules, right? Yeah, that's exactly what Russell tried to do. He tried to just change the rules
of set theory. He made up some new rules, and according to his rules, sets cannot contain
themselves. And that's what other mathematicians doing set theory have done, like the
Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. That's a version of set theory with some restrictions. They just get
rid of rule 11. And of course, if you get rid of rule 11, you say that sets cannot contain
themselves, well then you also have to get rid of rule 1, unrestricted composition, or the axiom
of unrestricted comprehension, or whatever you want to call it. So, that's what all the
mathematicians do. But does that work? Like, can we just change the rules? Back before, when
we were going through all those rules, rule one and rule 2, and all the way up to rule 11, were
we just making up the rules? No, we didn't just make up the rules, and so we can't just change
them. That was me; I just said that. What I'm going to argue for the next, I don't know, two
minutes, is that the rules

of set theory are not made-up rules. They're real, non-made-up, objective rules that already
exist, and they govern perhaps one of the most fundamental practices of human existence, and
that is predication. Now, I have to teach you some linguistics. This is going to take, I don't know,
60 seconds, 90 seconds, something like that. Once I've done that, I'm going to regenerate
Russell's paradox and show that it was never a paradox just for set theory. It's a paradox for all
of language and thought itself. Let's go. Here is a sentence: "Garfield is a cat." It contains four
words. Grammatically speaking, though, it has two essential parts. It has this first part, which is
called the subject of the sentence, and it has this second part, "is a cat," which is called the
predicate. The subject is what the sentence is about. It's about Garfield, the cat. And the
predicate says something of Garfield. It says that Garfield has a certain characteristic, and that
characteristic is being a cat. "LeBron" is the subject of this sentence. He's the thing that the
sentence is about, and "dunks," here we go, is the predicate. We can say that predicates are
true of certain subjects. So, the predicate "is a cat" is true of Garfield, and the predicate
"dunks" is true of LeBron, and it's not true of me. What was the relationship between sets and
objects? The relation was containment. Sets contain objects. The objects are in the sets. What
is the relation or the relationship between predicates and subjects? Being true of. Predicates
are true of, or a predicate is true of, a subject. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to
leverage this similarity to try to regenerate Russell's paradox, but now it's not with some made-
up rules of set theory but with some very much not made-up rules of predication. And
predication, let me just remind you, is just the practice of saying things about things. So, the
practice of predication is ubiquitous. It is utterly widespread. We do this constantly. We do it
linguistically all the time, out loud, and almost every thought we have predicates something of
something. Remember rule number one, unrestricted composition, for set theory? That rule
was the rule that there's a set for any imaginable collection of a thing or of things. Well, that
rule seems like it just is true of predication also. There is a predicate for any imaginable
characteristic of a thing. Anything that you can say about something, there's a predicate for
that. Of course, of course, there is. And those rules of set theory that allowed Russell in 1901
to generate his paradox, those rules of set theory, the relevant ones, they're just true of
predication too. Rule number 10 of predication: you can predicate things of predicates. Just like
you can have sets of sets, well, that's true. You can predicate things of predicates. Here's a
perfectly grammatical English sentence: "Is a cat." Sounds funny? Yeah, sure, kind of. It does
kind of sound funny when you think about it. "Is a cat." "Is the cat." "Is your cat?" Sure. It
sounds funny. In this sentence, the predicate "is a cat" is functioning as the subject of the
sentence. "Sounds funny" in this sentence is the predicate, and it's saying something about the
subject, which is the predicate "is a cat." Sure, we can do that. That's a perfectly meaningful
thing to do in any natural language. We can predicate things of predicates. Yes, we can. Can
you smell where this is going? Predicates can be true of themselves, just like sets can contain
themselves. Is this right? I think it is. Consider, for example, the sentence "Is a cat is a cat." Is
that true? No, because "is a cat" is a predicate, so it doesn't have a tail; it doesn't have fur. "Is a
cat" is not a cat. But what about this one: "Is a predicate is a predicate"? Yes, that's true. "Is a
predicate" is a predicate. It is. And that's a case where the predicate "is a predicate" is true of
itself. It says of itself that it's a predicate, and it's right. So, rule number 11: predicates can be
true of themselves. Some predicates, of course, are not true of themselves, like "is a cat." We
already saw that "is a cat" is not a cat, so that predicate is not true of itself. "Dunks." "Dunks"
doesn't dunk. "Dunks" is a predicate, so it can't play basketball. It can't dunk. So, it's not true to
say that "dunks" dunks. No, false. "Tastes like chicken." That's a predicate. Something can taste
like chicken. Does "taste like chicken" taste like chicken? No, it doesn't. "Taste like chicken" is a
predicate, so it doesn't taste like anything. But then you've got plenty of predicates that are
true of themselves. "Is a predicate" is a predicate. So, "is a predicate" is true of itself. "Is a
string of words" is a string of words. Yes, it is. So, that predicate is true of itself. "Typically
comes at the end of a sentence." Well, "typically comes at the end of a sentence" does typically
come at the end of a sentence. So, that predicate is true of itself. Now, let's try to make a
predicate that is true of all of the predicates that are true of themselves. And that predicate
just is "is true of itself." "Is true of itself" is true of all of the predicates that are true of
themselves. Fine, nothing wrong with that predicate. But then what if we tried to make a
predicate that's true of all of the predicates that are not true of themselves? That predicate
would be "is not true of itself." And now, we're gonna generate the paradox. I can't write this in
a letter to Gottlob Frege because Gottlob Frege is dead, but I'm writing it in a video to you.
Here's the question: "Is not true of itself," this predicate, is it true of itself? Let's go through
both possibilities. If it is true of itself, well then, what does it say about itself? It says that it's
not true of itself. So, if this predicate is true of itself, then it's not true of itself. If it is, then it
isn't. What about the alternative? If this predicate is not true of itself, then it's not true of itself.
But then, it meets the condition set out in itself. It meets, it has this characteristic specified by
the predicate. It's not true of itself. So, if it's not true of itself, well then, it's true of itself. If it is
true of itself, then it's not true of itself, and "not true" just means false. So, if it is true of itself,
then it's false of itself. And if it's false of itself, then it's true of itself.
 So, it's both true and false, which is a contradiction. And this isn't a paradox that we can just
escape by declaring that there is no rule 11. In the case of set theory, yeah, maybe we could
just declare that sets cannot contain themselves, but in the case of predication, which is just
talking, in the case of saying things about things, we can't just declare that predicates cannot
be true of themselves because they can. This rule 11, this just is true. And once you give me
rule 11, I'm gonna generate the paradox. This is a paradox that we can't escape.