Now that I've had the time & leisure to look deeper into Nagarjuna (http://www.smith.edu/philosophy/jgarfieldnlt.html), paraconsistent logic (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-paraconsistent/), and inconsistent mathematics (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathematics-inconsistent/), I can see that my side of the discussion with Ian was quite confused. Part of the confusion arose because all three of these were somehow equated with "doublethink."
The problem is that the latter two are quite different from Nagarjuna. Paraconsistent logic and inconsistent math are on the same high level of abstraction as Aristotle's logic, and in fact are responding to the well-known limits to purely logical thought. (These include the "liar's paradox," where someone says "this statement is a lie." Goedel's theorem also fits here.) The existence of these limits are one reason why I argue that purely logical thought (a la Aristotle) must be complemented by empirical research and dialectical heuristics.
On the other hand, Nagarjuna was a religious (Buddhist) philosopher who operated on the about the same level of abstraction as Hegel, dealing with issues of the contrast between "ultimate reality" and "conventional reality" (which corresponds roughly to, but is not the same as, the distinction that Plato made between the unseen forms and what we prisoners see as mere shadows on the cave wall). BTW, according to the essay cited above, Nagarjuna was not someone who rejected the law of non-contradiction. (The latter says that for any proposition A, we can't have both A and not-A being true.)
Nagarjuna is quite different from Marx, who was not only dealing with a more concrete level of abstraction than Aristotle but was also a (dialectical) materialist.
Further, neither Nagarjuna, nor paraconsistent logic, nor inconsistent mathematics justify double-think as Orwell defined it (e.g., as with the belief that "slavery is freedom," with no awareness of the discrepancy between truth and falsehood). (Orwell's concept of double-think, by the way, is in part a reaction to the misuse of Marx's dialectical heuristics by many Marxists during the 1930s and 1940s.)
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
