Monday, January 10, 2005 at 09:57PM
Matt Carter and Nick Trakakis are arguing over dialetheism. What’s dialetheism? It’s the view that some contradictory pairs of statements are true.
It’s interesting that Nick is trying the line that contradictions (conjunctions of the form ’p and not-p’) are meaningless. I always find it hard to judge claims of meaninglessness (since I don’t have on hand a general theory of meaningfulness), but I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for that line of argument. I would have thought that it was because we understood the meaning the statement ’p and not-p’ that we could see that it couldn’t be true.
But Nick’s in good company here. His view that contradictions (and tautologies) has proponents like the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus.
2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2005 Redesign – Teaching in Semester 1 – Back to work tomorrow – Work, work, work, work... – Matt and Nick talk Dialetheism – Darren Blogging for Tsunami Relief – Happiness is... – I've been writing – Wikis are fun – Get your kicks on Route 55 – Comments on Weblogs – Please Help Us #1: On Self-Saucing Pudding – University Library Proxy Bookmarklet – Logic Books at print.google.com – Seminars at Otago – Searching in Mac OS X Tiger – We're off in almost a month: I've got to get ready! – Skype – Teaching in Semester 2 – The Flight of the Balloon – Rearranging – Logic Colloquium 2005 and ESSLLI 2005 – On applescript and php, and an archive page – AJL – Loud – Up, up and away – In Århus – Keep up with our travels: the map – Off to Athens... – Legroom – Logic Colloquium 2005 Day 1 – Logic Colloquium 2005 Day 2 – Logic Colloquium 2005 Day 3 – Logic Colloquium 2005 Day 4 – Denmark, Oxford, Edinburgh … – … Iona, Glasgow, Oxford. – Reflections on Iona, part 1 – Reflections on Iona, part 2 – Cut elimination generalised – Week 1 – Time flies when... – Survived so far... – About to leave Oxford – 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 |
This is a news item at consequently.org. There are many others at the archive page. You can add comments at the end.
I’m Greg Restall, and this is my website. I work in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Email: greg at consequently.org; Post: School of of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia.
Start at the home page—a summary of the site. The left column is news, archived on the news archive page. The central column is for photos, archived on the occasional photos page. The right column contains recent items from the writing page, which lists my publications. These are also categorised by topic. You can follow my links at my account on delicious and occasional short snarky remarks at @consequently on twitter.
To subscribe to this site, either read the full feed
of everything, the feed of news items only
, or the feed of writing items only
, which is also great for podcasting pdfs automatically.
This site is handcoded: I write text in Textmate, and Webby files things in the right place and uploads them to the server. This page was last modified on 2009-01-07 at 12:28PM.
Contrariwise, if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic!
— Lewis Carroll.