Yep. People who say stuff like that will get worked up if money was taken from them (or they or their loved ones were physically assaulted or threatened) and won’t be wasting time philosomasturbating on the meaning of truth or objectivity.
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My intent was not to question the Law of Non-Contradiction as a general truth, but to question its applicability to my earlier post that Andrew was replying to. To the extent that my post lacked clarity on this point I apologise.
Throughout, I have been explicitly talking about things being considered “perfect, imperfect, good, bad, ordered, chaotic, moral and immoral” – labels that are heavily subject to perspective.
This difference in perspective may not even be different people (e.g. "Jim and “Paul”) seeing things differently. It may be the same person* seeing they same thing from different perspectives. Somebody might say that a given car model is “perfect” in encapsulating the automative zeitgist of its era, but “imperfect” in being particularly difficult to maintain. Likewise an infamously imperfect movie might be ‘so bad it is good’.
It is not that the Law of Non-Contradiction is sometimes wrong, it is that in some situations in the real world it may be difficult (and even possibly impossible) to work out how it applies.
Indeed. So it would still not be the case that a thing has an attribute and also does not. It would at most be the case that one perspective yields one opinion, while another yields another. This is not a challenge to Aristotle’s laws of thought so much as it is a criticism against a gross dismissal of context and nuance.
If someone were to say they found a car model both perfect and imperfect, it would rightly give us pause and have us question just what it is they could possibly mean by that, because, at face value, the statement is nonsensical, regardless of if and how perfection had previously been defined. And if upon investigation we found out that by “perfect” they meant “encapsulating the automotive Zeitgeist of its era well”, whereas by “imperfect” they meant “particularly difficult to maintain”, the natural reaction would not be amusement over our own silliness for not having correctly interpreted the initial statement to find it entirely un-objectionable. Rather I should think we would consider the speaker’s choice of words, where by “X is imperfect” they mean something other than “it is not the case that X is perfect”, to be an ineffective one for the purposes of communicating their intended meaning.
Maybe. Though I find it far more difficult to come up with an example of where it is something other than utterly trivial to see that surely it does.
Granted, with many opposite pairs it is not the case that they are true dichotomies. So something like, say, God being good and also evil, may not actually require either a relaxation of the law of non-contradiction, or the admittance of alternate perspectives. We seem at times comfortable allowing an object that is neither, so it’s not clear why something else couldn’t happen to be both. It seems therefore not the case that evil-ness is obviously the same as non-good-ness, and hence it is not obvious (until further clarification) that there is a problem with statements like that.
In that sense, I suspect we agree. What I’m cautioning against is this “nuance means logic may be all arbitrary” sentiment, even if that is not what you agree with, nor what you meant to voice.
With that clarification in mind (thanks), it does seem like you’re saying the same thing that I meant by “beyond perfection/imperfection”. I don’t necessarily agree with that concept [or non-concept?] of the divine – like I said, my sympathies lie with a more Western view – but I also don’t have a strong objection to it.
I think you are on to something here. If you consider something from two different perspectives, or in statistics two different observers, and then take a sample of paired-observers, you can count the number of pairs that agree (Concordance) or disagree (Discordance) and use these to come up with some simple measures of Agreement (Kappa) or Disagreement (McNemar’s test). A logical proposition is dichotomous (A or !A) and mutually exclusive. Agreement and Disagreement are opposites but not mutually exclusive; typically most of your sampled pairs may be concordant but there are still a significant number of discordances.
And now I might be wildly off-topic, but the agreement/disagreement is reasonable way to measure differing interpretations of scripture, where we might consider scripture to be a series of propositions (not necessarily logical).
And if I’m not far into the weeds already, Agreement and Disagreement are related to Reliability statistics. While the math here is fairly simple, “Agreement, Disagreement, and Reliable” are subjective terms, and the interpretation depends on the context.