So if you said Barney, and your brother said Stalin, both of you are right even though your answers do not match. Neither of you are wrong. You know with your awareness of being sure that you are right… and so is he.

However, knowing you even as casually as I do, I think that you’re being far too modest about your own ability. You could easily have solved Tierney’s puzzle, though maybe without the detour into ancient number systems. That was fun even though it didn’t lead to a solution.

That sounds like an interesting lit course you took. Do you happen to remember what poem your quote came from? I don’t know that one.

Your final point is both perceptive and important. Statements can be inconsistent without being contradictory. If I say that X is black and you say that it’s blue, we can both be wrong: it might be pink. But if I say that X is black and you say that “it’s not true that X is black,” then one of us must be right even if X doesn’t exist. We often make the mistake of assuming that if one explanation is wrong, then the next one we find must be right. It’s a psychological quirk of how our minds work.

Something similar often happens to novice chessplayers. They think for a minute or two about their next move, ruling out various possibilities until they realize that they’re running short of time. Then, they make the next move that occurs to them, on the assumption that if it’s not one of the “wrong” moves they’ve just been contemplating, it must be a “right” move.

Something like that happened to me in a university literature course. There was a line of poetry that went, “I told my love/I told my love”… the professor explained that “to tell” could also mean to quantify something. So was the poet telling his lover of his love per se, or that he had measured its relative value? And suddenly it came to me, and I asked, “Couldn’t it be both?” And I realized that’s where he was steering us. That’s when I first became aware of the real subjectivity of “meaning”.

It’s really something to see it so visually demonstrated here. It took me a while but I got where you were going by the time Stalin was sitting on his hands. But then, it took me to my third essay to stop arguing against Deconstructionism in that lit course.

Thanks for this.

And I’d like to point out an alternate to your conclusion. You state “The awareness that however sure we are that we’re right, we still might be wrong.”
The awaremess that however sure we are that we’re right, does not mean that others are not also right.
(Not so much that we’re wrong, but that, like in your tests, more than one answer is possible, thus making each answer right, even if the answer does not match ours or equate to the same result.)