Saturday, August 02, 2008

Answer to Kyle S on the Law of Non-Contradiction

Recall that my premise is below HERE
What I state below is merely meant to be supplemental and not a complete proof. Again, I'm merely trying to clear some confusion that seems to exist.

So the question is regarding the “Law of Non-Contradiction”. More specifically, (and I’ll quote Aristotle – who might I say was not a Christian): "one cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time". And in its simple form, A cannot be –A at the same time. So how then is this not absolutely true, and simply systemically true?

Lets first recall that for something to be absolute it must :
1.) Exist Independently
2.) Exist not in relation to other things
3.) Exist not relative to other things
4.) Be true for every possible circumstance

So all we have to do to test whether or not the law of contradiction is absolute is to test it up against the above 4 items.

1.) Let’s first consider that in order to be absolute it must EXIST INDEPENDENTLY:

Here is the law again: “A” cannot be “-A” at the same time. I think we both could agree that by itself that statement is meaningless, and what I mean by that is “A” by itself is arbitrary. It’s meaningless until applied to something, lets say your wallet, or an apple, or a car. Furthermore we cannot even come to apply such a “law” to the world without first having the world; in other words, things to apply to “A”, and I’d think we’d both agree on that. In this way the law does not exist independently because it is systemically dependent upon the existence of things in the world to make propositions about.

Further yet, to apply such a law to objects, first requires a mind to do so, and a mind with a language. Recall what Aristotle says: "one cannot *say* of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time". And notice that I highlighted the key word in the proposition, that being “SAY”.

2 & 3.) It must not exist in relation to other things and it must not be relative.

What I state in #1 adequately answers to points 2 & 3. It stands in relation and relative to other things because without the systemic whole we would be unable to make such a proposition, it wouldn’t make sense.

5.) True for every possible circumstance.

Again, refer to 1 above. “A” cannot be “-A” at the same time is meaningless and would not exists without the system as a whole. Further, it only makes sense when applied to things in the world. Finally, one wasn’t SAYING anything before there was mind.

Let’s address another anomaly:

Consider the following
[1.]All men are mortal
[2.]Socrates is a man
[3.]Therefore Socrates is mortal."

Sye compared this argument to his, and stated that they were the same:
1. The existence of God is a nec precondition of the existence of logic
2. Logic exists
3. Therefore: God exists

I pointed out the following:
1.)That men are mortal can be shown to be true by itself.
2.)That Socrates is man can also be shown to be true by itself.
3.) Therefore we can conclude that 2 is 1.

Following this Sye challenged me to prove that “all men are mortal” is true as according to him it begs the question. So here it goes:

The fundamental problem with this, and the reason Sye believes it to beg the question is that he has an absolute world view. So he looks at “ALL MEN ARE MORTAL” as meaning absolute; where as I look at it systemically. That all men are mortal is systemically true in that, we know that up to this point all men have died. It IS NOT a presupposition; it is simply fitting with our experience of systemic reality. So to say that all men are mortal is simply pointing what we agree to be a valid/true proposition regarding our experience. Again, it is only propositions which are true or false, things by themselves do not carry the property truth.

For example: we may agree it is true that an apple is red, but we would never say, “an apple is true”, this simply doesn’t make sense. Furthermore, that the apple is red is true not in any absolute sense, but because we systemically agree. Whether what you see as being red is the same as what I see as being red, no one knows, what’s important is that we agree. If we don’t, this doesn’t necessarily point to one party being wrong on the matter, what we see is what we see. What’s wrong is the word that we used to represent what we’re seeing amongst a community of people who share a language. Again, our senses are not wrong, and the apple is not wrong, the word simply did not fit the context of the language you were using.

To get back to my point:
As a result, systemically it IS TRUE that all men are mortal. Now we could probably argue about Socrates’ existence, but that’s neither here nor there. I can simply refer to Socrates [Bob], my next door neighbor.

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