Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Through the Looking Glass', 'Existence and Quantification' and 'After Finitude'

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4 ideas

4. Formal Logic / D. Modal Logic ML / 1. Modal Logic

5745	Quine says quantified modal logic creates nonsense, bad ontology, and false essentialism [Melia on Quine]
	Full Idea: Quine charges quantified modal systems of logic with giving rise to unintended sense or nonsense, committing us to an incomprehensible ontology, and entailing an implausible or unsustainable Aristotelian essentialism.
	From: comment on Willard Quine (Existence and Quantification [1966]) by Joseph Melia - Modality Ch.3
	A reaction: A nice summary. Personally I like essentialism in accounts of science (see Nature|Laws of Nature|Essentialism), so would like to save it in metaphysics. Possible worlds ontology may be very surprising, rather than 'incomprehensible'.

4. Formal Logic / E. Nonclassical Logics / 7. Paraconsistency

19663	We can allow contradictions in thought, but not inconsistency [Meillassoux]
	Full Idea: For contemporary logicians, it is not non-contradiction that provides the criterion for what is thinkable, but rather inconsistency.
	From: Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude; the necessity of contingency [2006], 3)
	A reaction: The point is that para-consistent logic might permit isolated contradictions (as true) within a system, but it is only contradiction across the system (inconsistencies) which make the system untenable.

19664	Paraconsistent logics are to prevent computers crashing when data conflicts [Meillassoux]
	Full Idea: Paraconsistent logics were only developed in order to prevent computers, such as expert medical systems, from deducing anything whatsoever from contradictory data, because of the principle of 'ex falso quodlibet'.
	From: Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude; the necessity of contingency [2006], 3)

19665	Paraconsistent logic is about statements, not about contradictions in reality [Meillassoux]
	Full Idea: Paraconsistent logics are only ever dealing with contradictions inherent in statements about the world, never with the real contradictions in the world.
	From: Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude; the necessity of contingency [2006], 3)
	A reaction: Thank goodness for that! I can accept that someone in a doorway is both in the room and not in the room, but not that they are existing in a real state of contradiction. I fear that a few daft people embrace the logic as confirming contradictory reality.