Timeline for Is "A and not-A" meaningful (and false) or meaningless?
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| Jul 17, 2017 at 3:46 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | If we argue that Schrödinger's cat is not an example because it's describing a state of affairs, might that suggest that the domain of discourse for your question is, in fact, only cases where the Law of Non-Contradiction holds? In which case, the answer is brutally easy. | |
| Jun 7, 2016 at 18:57 | comment | added | user20153 | @Guambra feo: sure, but if you stipulate ahead of time that A and not A is essentially contradictory, then the argument will be circular. But we are not forced to this, it's just a convention. There's no reason to reject the notion that A and "not A" are not so clear-cut, so they can be meaningfully combined. So in a sense the question is just "what is a contradiction" and maybe the answer is not so clear (quantummy), just as "what is logical consequence" remains unanswered. A logician who insists otherwise can be answered with a simple "says who?". | |
| Jun 7, 2016 at 18:49 | comment | added | user20153 | @shane: think of it as chicken/egg: is a whole a sum of parts, or are parts the fragments of a whole? It's perfectly symmetrical so there is no reason to favor one side over the other a priori. If you think about it, it's entirely reasonable to think that we came up with "words" by splitting whole utterances, ditto for meanings. Robert Brandom is a good source on the philosophical side of this; see his "Articulating Reasons". It's a view closely tied to holism. And no, there can be no formal semantics for language. Linguists should listen to philosophers! | |
| Jun 6, 2016 at 23:56 | comment | added | user5172 | @mobileink I'm not aware of any controversy about the compositionality of meaning. Could you point me to the relevant literature? I'm quite skeptical, since any good argument to think that meaning isn't compositional would be tantamount to a good argument that there could be no formal semantics for language. I think the linguists would be quite surprised to hear that! | |
| Jun 6, 2016 at 23:15 | comment | added | Guambra Feo | Aha, I thought of Schroedinger's cat as a counterexample, but I am not convinced. The cat in that experiment, being alive and dead at the same time in a quantum state, is neither alive in the same sense in which my cat at home is alive, nor dead in the sense in which her predecessor is deceased. Whatever the status of Schroedinger's cat (both before and after peeking), it is a state-of-affairs that is not (logically) self-contradictory. | |
| Jun 6, 2016 at 22:52 | comment | added | user20153 | "A and not A" is not conceptually incoherent. Schroedinger's cat is dead and not dead. Perplexing, yes; incoherent, not so much. | |
| Jun 6, 2016 at 22:49 | comment | added | user20153 | Whether or not meaning is compositional (sum of parts) is a matter of considerable debate. | |
| Jun 6, 2016 at 19:32 | comment | added | Guambra Feo | Thanks, yes I can see the force behind the suggestion that "if you conjoin two meaningful sentences, you still get a meaningful sentence in return". I was pulled away from that conclusion by the idea that meaning implies conceivability. A meaningful proposition P must refer to a state of affairs that could conceivably be the case. But "A and not-A" is conceptually incoherent so couldn't possibly refer to a state of affairs in any logically possible world. And couldn't we say that mathematicians reveal certain conjectures to be, in fact, meaningless when placed under scrutiny? | |
| Jun 6, 2016 at 18:39 | history | answered | user5172 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |