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Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

But the Law of Non-Contradiction does hold.

And it's very easy to save the PEM if you distinguish the value of a proposition (true or false) and the cognitive status of the proposition (certain, probable, possible, or arbitrary).

Moreover, to exist is to have a particular identity, to have a nature, to be something.

Thus, all of this work is utter hogwash. The professor who wrote this IS practicing mysticism and irrationality. He ought to be shunned by all actual philosophers.

If this kind of thinking were to get "popular," Western civilization and science would collapse into skepticism and religion would take over again. Just as happened in the Middle Ages and at the end of the Islamic Golden Age (in the latter case, there never was a recovery).

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1) Graham Priest is one of the most famous logicians of this century.

2) The LNC is an axiom it doesnt "hold", its either built into what you mean by identity or it isnt. Either way there is no non-circular "hold"ing.

3) Im sure the notions of truth, falsity and consistency are far too technical here for the lay person to get a serious grasp of but i'd be careful of rationalizing your own ignorance by projecting stupidity onto others.

For 2, yes, the LNC is an axiom.

What that properly means is that to deny it is a contradiction, because it must be assumed to deny it.

In other words, you can't say "The truth is, there is no truth." Which is what Graham Priest is doing.

1 is an interesting observation, but has no bearing on the facts of the case: he is a fraud.

3: You should be ashamed to make a statement like this in an intellectual conversation. If you feel the need to bolster your argument with an unsubstantiated character attack like this, you must not feel that your argument is sound.

No offense, but I'd flag your comment for #3, except it's not worth wasting moderators' time on.

The author himself wrote:

The constructions I have described show how to make precise mathematical sense of the Buddhist views. This does not, of course, show that they are true.

> How can contradictions be true? What’s all this talk of ineffability? This is all nonsense. The constructions I have described show how to make precise mathematical sense of the Buddhist views. This does not, of course, show that they are true. That’s a different matter. But it does show that these ideas can be made as logically rigorous and coherent as ideas can be.

No, they are nonsense. Nothing that claims that something can be true and false can be logically rigorous. To be logically rigorous means to be logical---and to be logical means to obey the law of non-contradiction.

Anyway, it's at least gross negligence for the author to write an article like this and then not explicitly declare that these ideas are nonsensical.

I think I have made my point, I don't want to continue the discussion, though I will be interested to read any further follow-ups.

while i don't agree with priest either, your reasoning is bad.

the point is not to argue against how people define logic, or anything as arbitrary or seemingly self-defeating as that.

the point is to provide a functional logic in the face of the liar's paradox and the like. regardless of the motivations of individual philosophers, the work itself posits as motivations actual technical problems. the technical problems generally arise from self-reference, but (as you can see with varieties of incompleteness proofs as well) you don't need outright self-reference to get the truth of a statement resting on its negation.

yell all you want about rigor, the onus is on you to use conventional logic to resolve these tensions. again, i personally think that proponents of many-valued logic are misguided in their large scale view of truth functional representation (and i probably think the same of you!). however, i respect that they seek to defend it by solving problems rather than saying "hurr, 'this is a lie' just doesn't mean anything at all. and oh yeah, language is compositional, truth is correspondence, and i'll hear nothing saying otherwise!"

Yes of course we can get away from defining any new systems of logic by simply taking working with different kinds of relations or functions in our classical logic. This doesn't show that non-classical logics are useless but that classical logic and classical mathematics are incredibly powerful and can describe practically anything.

Note that this article is very far from the wishy washy hippie claims like "Everything is connected! And you have your truth man and I have my truth". Instead it gives a popular-science description of some non-classical systems of logic, their historical background and how they relate to Buddhist philosophy and certain problems of reference. Personally I don't really think the logics presented solve these problems in a satisfactory way, but they are definitely of philosophical interest (o/w Cambridge University Press wouldn't have published his "An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic").

Javert - protagonist in les miserable. Destroyed in the end by his own mental rigidity. I think you may be trolling :)

So it's trolling for a computer scientist to support Aristotelian logic as opposed to Buddhism? Wow.

But yeah, I do recognize the irony. I admire moral rigidity, which is why I picked the username. Though I don't necessarily agree with javert's particular sense of morality, which obviously didn't work out too well for him.

>If this kind of thinking were to get "popular," Western civilization and science would collapse into skepticism and religion would take over again. Just as happened in the Middle Ages and at the end of the Islamic Golden Age (in the latter case, there never was a recovery).

argumentum ad consequentiam

I made my argument in the first 4 sentences of my comment, and this, my 5th sentence, was an aside.

All this is obvious, and your comment is dishonest.

"Moreover, to exist is to have a particular identity, to have a nature, to be something."

Tweet! Assuming the conclusion! 10 yard penalty, return the sliotar to first base.

Can something exist without identity?

Can something exist yet have no nature?

Can something exist without being (anything)?

Let me start by pointing to to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7715277.

How do you know something exists?

Because you can see it.

So you don't know that something exists, you only know that your sense impressions have been triggered. How do you know its nature?

Because of what you see.

So you don't know anything about its nature, only about its relationship with your sensory apparatus. (Hey, I may have just invented category theory!)

How can something exist...?

Don't look at me, man. It's all probability waves as far as I can tell.

Note: I don't really, actually, myself, buy into this form of epistemology and metaphysics, so I may have the arguments badly. On the other hand, those are major topics that have a lot of diverse implications. They cannot simply be dismissed by assertion.

By your logic, that you didn't own but used nevertheless:

You don't know I asked those questions, you only know that your sense impressions have been triggered.

Similarly my eyes sent some signals to my brain and after processing them I have concluded that you have replied to my comment. But wait! I don't really know you replied me, do I?

Since my senses are unreliable and I don't have any other means to interact with reality but my senses, my mind is impotent to deal with reality. What else can I do but go through my life hallucinating and doubting myself or inventing fantasies to keep my sanity.

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When you look at the moon (at the right time) you see circle. Then you can decide the moon is circular. Your senses are working just fine, so is your brain. It's your limited knowledge that leads you to wrong conclusions. As you observe and learn more, you integrate more and more concepts and you can eventually arrive to the point that moon is indeed a somewhat spherical object.

Or you can conclude that your senses are lying to you and reality cannot be known. Then you'd never go further than "looks circular, but know knows, right?".

Not assuming the conclusion, but stating a conclusion.

You might as well make the same comment in response to the statment, "Python is an interpreted language."

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