[i]There are two nearby villages. In one village, the people who live there only tell the truth. In the other village, the people who live there only tell lies.
Two paths run from these villages and meet at a crossroads where you are standing. A man from one of these villages comes along and you want to know which he comes from – the truthfull village or the village of liars.
To solve this puzzle, there is only one question you are allowed to ask. What is the question?[/i]
What’s really funny is that I posted this question on a philosophy board elsewhere and no one came up with your sort of answer. The answers given were of the type:“If you came from the other village, would you answer no if I were to ask you if you came from the liar’s village?”
In other words the answers given relied on logic and were very difficult to follow, whereas your sort of answer is the straightforward and common sense one.
The reason I was prompted to ask this question was because I recently watched Werner Herzog’s film Kaspar Hauser. In the film, if you don’t know it, Kaspar is a young man who has spent his formative years living in a cellar with no human company. When he was released from the cellear and abandoned in a village, he was adopted by an old man who took it upon himself to educate Kaspar. Part of Kaspar’s education included visits from mathematicians who presented him with this same problem. to their total frustration, Kaspar offered thie answer: “Are you a tree-frog?”. Blindingly simple and obvious but the mathematicians were so hung up on mental gymnastics and games of logic that they wouldn’t accept Kaspar’s simple, easily understandable answer - "The reasoning is the thing. In Logic and Masthematics, we do not understand. We reason and we deduce.
So it makes me wonder how many times scientists and philosophers have gone for complex difficult to follow answers to questions - that they do not understand perhaps - when there are much simpler, more easily implemented solutions around. For example, there were many other theories competing with Einstein’s when he came up with his relativity theory. But these competing theories were never examined and in fact forgotten. Not only that, but Einstein’s theory of general relativity, like the ‘logical’ answer to the above puzzle, was nest to useless in the real world.
So how useful is the process of ‘reasoning’ and ‘logic’ one wonders?
