On 06 Sep 2012, at 21:03, meekerdb wrote:
On 9/6/2012 11:52 AM, Brian Tenneson wrote:
A too much powerful God leads to inconsistency.
What if reality does not always obey the laws of logic? What if
reality is sometimes inconsistent?
This is a confusion of levels. Logic is rules about truth
preservation in declarative sentences. Not 'obeying the laws of
logic' just means declaring inconsistent sentences. We try to avoid
this because such utterances would have no determinate meaning. So
a *descriptions* of reality may be inconsistent (and therefore
useless) but reality is just whatever it is. It can't be
inconsistent because it's not assertions.
Right. A theory, or a set of beliefs, or a set of propositions can be
inconsistent. To say that reality is inconsistent or that a model (in
the logician's sense) is inconsistent does not make sense, unless you
build a theory in which reality is itself only a set of beliefs close
for some logic.
Now, with comp the reality we can take is arithmetical truth, and even
if seen as a set of sentences, I doubt this can be inconsistent.
But if you start with a set ontology, then indeed, I can imagine
inconsistencies, but that would not be an inconsistency in reality,
but inconsistency in the idea that reality is the set theoretical
assumption again, in that case.
Paraconsistent logics, which admit local inconsistencies, make sense
for the study of natural languages, but if we agree that reality
itself is an inconsistent set of of beliefs, I'm afraid the entire
idea of science would be jeopardized. Any refutation of any theory
could be accounted by a statement like "let us admit we are
inconsistent". Once, I refute (= found an inconsistency) in the
argument of someone pretending to show me a flaw in UDA, and
eventually he told me that he accept being inconsistent, but then why
should he not apply this to UDA itself? That just don't make sense,
but of course, sense is no more relevant once you accept inconsistency.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
