“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, October 7, 2011

"God Is Nothing, because No Human Has Ever Asserted Contradictory Things that Are True"

Graham Priest

I'm sorry to break it to Mark Goldblatt, but the law of noncontradiction (LNC) has never been proved. Goldblatt writes:

No human being has ever lived, no human society has ever existed, that did not accept and rely upon the validity of the laws of thought [LNC, the law of the excluded middle (LEM), identity, causality]; they are the foundation of  reasoning and knowing.


Wrong. There is at least one person alive today who has produced quite workable and beautiful logical systems (within logic, that is, not in some parallel universe outside logic) that don't rely on LNC. He also puts LEM, another one of Goldblatt's laws, in trouble. He exists! Look, that's him in the picture!

The onus is on proponents of LNC to explain why it can't cope with simple sentences we say every day. And Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. And transfinite sets. And...

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