Paradox (literature)
Paradox, however, is essential to the structure and being of the poem. In "The Well Wrought Urn" Brooks shows that paradox was so essential to poetic meaning that paradox was almost identical to poetry. According to literary theorist Leroy Searle, Brooks' use of paradox emphasized the indeterminate lines between form and content. "The form of the poem uniquely embodies its meaning," and the language of the poem "affects the reconciliation of opposites or contraries." While irony functions within the poem, paradox often refers to the meaning and structure of the poem and is thus inclusive of irony. This existence of opposites or contraries and the reconciliation thereof is poetry and the meaning of the poem.
Conditioning (probability)
In order to avoid paradoxes (such as the Borel's paradox), the following important distinction should be taken into account. If a given event is of nonzero probability then conditioning on it is well-defined (irrespective of any other events), as was noted above. By contrast, if the given event is of zero probability then conditioning on it is ill-defined unless some additional input is provided. Wrong choice of this additional input leads to wrong conditional probabilities (expectations, distributions). In this sense, ""the concept of a conditional probability with regard to an isolated hypothesis whose probability equals 0 is inadmissible."" (Kolmogorov.